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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#221
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't formed a strong opinion on affirmative action yet. > You cannot justify holding Asian-Americans to a higher level because "they can handle it." The person you're replying to didn't say anything like that. > It disgusts me that you can say "this is good for America" when Asian-American children have to go through a nightmare to have a chance at opportunities comparable to their peers, simply because of the c…

How do we know what 'race' someone is, do we just ask them or do we test for DNA. The more you drill down into the race question the more absurd it seems, and you quickly realize people either mean culture or some DNA pseudo-science.

I remember reading about Brazil resorting to head measurements to see if one were one's claimed race and were not cheating to get an advantage. Just a cursory search seems to show the practice is ongoing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-wit...

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#222

What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

There is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians. Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion ; they are interested in more inclusion .

I have a difficult time squaring claims like this with the decade-long national conversation about racial quotas for Asians (which has done almost nothing to eliminate these racial quotas) and the recent SF public school policy changes in which gifted math classes were eliminated because too many Asian people were taking them.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#223
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to also not discriminate against white students. I'm aware that at super elite schools this discrimination usually helps white people, but in a lot of other situations it doesn't.

IIRC, Ivy League schools actually have a lower proportion of white students compared to the percentage of the total populace that's white. Of course, if you look at grade schools, it looks like racial minorities are 'overrepresented' compared to the general population, so it's possible there's just fewer young white people.

> I'm aware that at super elite schools this discrimination usually helps white people,

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#224
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America needs to build more colleges. Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.

Or fix the demand side. Right now, megacorps are abusing colleges as a filter to weed out people who can't cope with high stress environments or keep deadlines and, even more egregious, load the cost for a lot of what used to be employer-paid on-the-job training onto the students via student loans. A "bullshit job" should not require a college degree.

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#226
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…

You can, absolutely. A lottery system for admissions.

Not sure if you're joking but it would be a heck of a lot more fair. Just have some sort of objective bar like SAT score, and then do a lottery.

Then you don't have the "did we do enough for XYZ group", the RNG will simplify both decision making and justification. If there's x% of XYZ passing the minimum score, that's how many will be in your class.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a bioinformaticist. Try the 23andme algorithm, or whatever they used in the research that compared self-reported race to genetically measured ancestry. (The objective definition of your race is defined by where your ancestors come from, which, due to how babies get made, can be measured from your DNA. You can read more about this "DNA pseudo-science" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis ) College admis…

I am a biologist and a bioinformatician, though not currently active in those fields. There is no such thing as an "objective definition of race", and claiming that so-called race can be determined from one's DNA is indeed pseudo-science.

> claiming that so-called race can be determined from one's DNA is indeed pseudo-science.

That's taking it way too far. Genotyping populations identifies variation, and in cases where populations that have been reproductively isolated for tens of thousands of years (e.g. western Europeans and west/central Africans) are now in proximity, there will be substantial variation that is idiosyncratic to each population.

In the US, reproductively isolated populations were suddenly placed in the same territory, and taboos on inter-racial mating persisted until very recently (50% toleration in the mid-1990s). One can accurately tell whether an American is phenotypically white versus black (or mixed) by DNA.

That isn't to say that our ability to predict accurately black-vs-white will remain. The more race-mixing, the less ability to accurately categorize. We'll instead move to a situation similar to the one in which 'white' people find themselves today, where they are mixes of x percent of a variety of populations and not categorically 'Dutch,' 'Irish,' 'Finnish,' etc.

Race is a sociological concept, yes, but it reflects reality in that people are visibly different. These differences are genetic in origin. It just so happens that in some cases, (e.g. two reproductively isolated and visibly distinct populations suddenly in contact with one another), these social categorizations will map to biological ones. In other cases where there is convergent evolution in terms of physical appearance, they won't.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#228
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this might be nepotism and networking. Maybe we should ban those from recruitment. Can't recommend anyone anymore. Just purely blind system, maybe text or voice changer, so visuals involved...

Orchestras have blind auditions for precisely that reason, and it apparently works. It's not a perfect system, mostly because the classical music world itself has certain barriers built into it that are tough to navigate, but it certainly does have the intended effect.

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#229
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, though your dice might not be weighted the way you thought. Rather, you might want to look at the pipeline. Asian culture is particularly education focused, so is it surprising that Asians are overrepresented in areas heavily associated with education?

"Asian culture" is hardly a monolith. It may not make sense to admit ~0 Filipinos because the quota for Chinese students has been hit.

Oh, definitely. There are exceedingly common trends amongst east-Asians (Chinese/Koreans/Japanese) though, as there's a shared lineage there, both genetic and cultural. Take a look at all three countries, as well as the Chinese diaspora. They definitely share similarities on how they treat education.

But my point is, you get an overrepresentation of "Asians" due to the increased focus. This leads to an increased flow of more qualified candidates due to the greater investment from the "Asian" population. The issue for African American underrepresentation is in my opinion, the pipeline, not the admission.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#230
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admission slots are not artificially scarce. You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You're still avoiding the question. Is your position "I support inclusion, only when resources are not scarce?"

> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sens…

> You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country.

That's the system we have now. But you end up running out of students who are capable of receiving an excellent education.

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