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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

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251–260 of 624 posts

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand, this is the last dying throes of a liberal fire that has been raging for hundreds of years. Liberalism has achieved great things in the west, including expanding the rights of women, minorities, and LGBT individuals. We are all better off for its achievements. However, the low hanging fruit is taken, and now the same activists that once fought for noble goals are reduced to taking ever more di…

Nit: it's not liberalism, but rather the general progressive/socialist movements. Some of the things being championed are highly illiberal, for example CRT has anti-liberalism as a central tenet.

Is there some manifesto or doc for it?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#252
post #130

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?

No, affirmative action is literally equal outcome at the expense of equal oportunity.

This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.

As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.

'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the bottom half, most of those aren't the kind of shitty parents you're suggesting they are, either. Well, the black bastardy rate at last count was 70%. They're not exactly model parents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...

Outside actual poverty, the kids are still getting fed, going to school, maybe they're one console generation behind two-parent households but even that's not such a big deal now...

Kids from single parent households are something like half as likely to graduate high school and considerably more likely to end up in prison. It's a big deal.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#254
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…

Despite the increased chances of admission, black students make up a modest 5% of the (e.g.) Harvard student body compared to Asian students and white students at 13% and 40% respectively. Ultimately, I can't justify the idea of rejecting students based on race, but when I look at those demographics I just don't see much to get worked up about. From a more cynical angle the problem almost seems like "the total percen…

Is a quality education really what is at stake here? Are the faculty teaching undergraduate courses that much superior to those who teach elsewhere? I suspect that if the quality of education is better, it is because of the college-readiness of the students admitted. (So kids, you are the customer, but you are also the product.)

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the increased chances of admission, black students make up a modest 5% of the (e.g.) Harvard student body compared to Asian students and white students at 13% and 40% respectively. Ultimately, I can't justify the idea of rejecting students based on race, but when I look at those demographics I just don't see much to get worked up about. From a more cynical angle the problem almost seems like "the total percen…

> Ultimately, I can't justify the idea of rejecting students based on race, but when I look at those demographics I just don't see much to get worked up about. If you look at those particular stats, sure, it doesn't sound particularly objectionable. But if you look at others: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15/politics/harvard-affirmative-... > Under questioning from SFFA lawyer John Hughes, Fitzsimmons detailed some of…

> So, an individual Asian student needs to score much higher to have a chance at Harvard, compared to students of other ethnicities. That's very blatantly racial discrimination.

> This amounts to, "sorry, we have enough people of your color, so we're gonna make it harder for you to get in." That's wrong. Period.

"The law of unintended consequences" ... what are they going to do if the target demographic (in this case Asians) start their own merit-based and academic-based colleges and universities?

Sure, it's not cheap, but large communities have done much more expensive things in the educational space before, and of course being pure merit-based means that the graduates will (eventually) be more sought after than the standard colleges[1].

Will someone then cry racism then?

[1] Maybe not to the level that Harvard grads are.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#256

Quoted post unavailable.

Please let us know how the racial quotas for Asians are good.

Asians not getting into Harvard are the rare birds getting killed by wind turbines.

The people who care about the rare birds are not anti-renewable, and people who complain about the birds dying actually don't care, they want to kill a lot more birds with their fossil fuels.

So do I need to explain to you why killing birds is good? Or can I just point out that it's a stupid gotcha attempt.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#257
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it require 5 years tax returns.

Even then, 1 year off is a 20% income reduction on paper. 2 years would be 40%. Want to catch people voluntarily taking off work versus being 'legitimately' unemployed? (For example, is a realtor with no income during the housing crisis adequately poor?) Then, every university will have to hire people to do the analyses and make value judgements. Long term, factoring in wealth creates all sorts of perverse incentives…

Can’t this be taken into account by also considering wealth and assets, rather than by only income?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#258
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: it's not liberalism, but rather the general progressive/socialist movements. Some of the things being championed are highly illiberal, for example CRT has anti-liberalism as a central tenet.

Is there some manifesto or doc for it?

Not really, but learning about the Frankfurt School during the Weimar Republic is a good foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if there were racial disparities in your primary and secondary education systems which lowered the scores of some racial groups, then your supposedly objective "minimum score cutoff" would still be discriminatory.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#260
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.

Just because a measure is imperfect it doesn't mean it's pseudoscience. Sure, race is not fully concrete but denying that there are any differences between people of sufficiently different populations is just demonstratably wrong.
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