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

These folks have tremendous power on elected officials. When I say, "Democrats think that standardized tests are racist," I'm not complaining about some Sunrise tweet. It actually happened at my high school: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/25/judge-th...

> Likewise: despite the fact that no President the Democrats elect would support your schools forcing your kids to "build their AAPI identity"

Unelected bureaucrats, teachers unions, etc., have tremendous power over what kids learn. The left is exceptionally adept at using control over institutions to effect political change bypassing elected officials. The President can help such efforts or hinder them through control of the Dept. of Ed., e.g. Title VI and Title IX. Biden rescinded Trump's CRT ban, and Kamala Harris would co-sign whatever Randi Weingarten wanted. A President DeSantis, by contrast, may well use Title VI to stamp out the practice. Again, not a theoretical concern: this is actually happening in my kid's school.

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.

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Since no one else is defending race-aware admissions policies, I'll do it here.

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, and education is "the great leveler" and we want to level people from all walks of life as much as we can, given scarce resources. It's better for society.

The right characterizes these racially representative cohorts as unfair, because they believe they should be instead constructed from test scores. They'll say merit, but their only measure is test scores which aren't good indicators of merit because of systemic racism. If we went with this system, we would retrench and amplify existing biases and inequalities.

The current regime is doing pretty good at representation (2019) [Wiki US race] [Undergraduate race]:

AAPI in college/US: 6.89%/6.1%

Blacks in college/US: 12.65%/12.4%

Whites in college/US: 55.12%/60.1%

Hispanics in college/US: 21.08%/18.3%

While not perfect, college undergraduate racial makeup mostly tracks US racial makeup. The main difference is Whites are underrepresented. This is a success story. 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. We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

And to be clear, what these policies certainly are not is a long con to bar AAPI from undergraduate programs. If that were true, they wouldn't be overrepresented.

> When I say, "Democrats think that standardized tests are racist," I'm not complaining about some Sunrise tweet. It actually happened at my high school

This is a great example. The judge in this case said exactly this: "The discussion of TJ admissions was infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception" and "The Board’s policy was designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans". Clearly, like you, he's on the side of test scores, rather than racial representation.

But another way of describing what administrators tried to do at your school is they changed the admissions process in pursuit of a more racially representative student body, and relying on standardized testing would have run counter to their purpose, as it disadvantages the races of students they wanted to increase the numbers of.

This isn't a Democratic idea, this is a well-known admissions problem. When MIT announced they were reinstating their SAT/ACT requirements, they wrote a thoroughly cited explanation about why, noting that "research... shows correlations [with socioeconomic status] for just about every... factor admissions officers can consider... we always have to adjust for context". [MIT] It's a really interesting read; I recommend it.

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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). But this is a complex issue with society-wide implications, and we're debating it down in the muck with cheap rhetorical tricks, name-calling, and hand-wavey conspiracy theories. There's a high-level debate to be had about how we allocate educational resources in the US, and probably even about who ought to decide that. But racially representative cohorts have been outstandingly good for the US; we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss them as racist and unfair. Fairness has lots of layers and if we ourselves are to have any hope of being fair, we have to appreciate its complexity.

[Biden education]: https://joebiden.com/education/

[SAT stats]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_226.10.a...

[Wiki US race]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

[Undergraduate race]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastFacts/display.asp?id=98

[MIT]: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...

If that's the case, they're not doing a great job of telling that story. The "weirdos on Twitter and in elite college administrations" seem to have the louder voice by far.

If the party wants to tell that story, it probably need to be in terms of loud, clear, and frequent denunciations; not awkward handwringing trying have it both ways and a "clarifying" point on page 97 of the platform.

It cuts both ways! We have a two-party system in the US for almost mathematical reasons, and both sides have tons of incentive to play at a politics of disqualification. There are sane, fundamental differences of policy opinion between Democrats and Republicans that have nothing do with eldritch hierarchies of grievance or unhinged conspiracy theories; the R's and D's have different preferred solutions to important problems everyone agrees exist, and neither party can claim always to have the best answers. Democrats who don't want to confront the difficult issues of, say, out-of-control public sector unions and unsustainable pension liability would much rather cast Republicans as the party of attempted coups. We need level-headed, persuasive, rational Republicans and Democrats so we can work out the real policy issues, and get the approaches of both parties on the table.

But in this thread, I'm not attempting to DQ Republicans; I'm saying that there's no win to have from DQ'ing either party.

Rayiner can't say the same thing; he's --- for reasons I don't totally understand --- abandoned that principle, because he believes the Democratic party is dedicated to a mission of creating a new American caste system. In that, he shares the faults of Democrats who, for instance, believe that if we can just raise enough money we can pull Clarence Thomas off the court. Those people are unserious. But it's fun to pretend they're not, so, here we are.

There's a trivially easy way out of this mess for him. He could just confine his critique to the far-left wing of the Democratic party. I'd even give it to him if he chose the term "progressive" as a shorthand for it. But to do so would be to surrender the disqualification card he's time and again trying to play on the entire Democratic party. Someday soon I'll probably slip up and do the same thing with the Republicans, and when that happens, I hope he calls me out too (maybe less indulgently and with fewer words than I'm burning on this).

It's not unreasonable through. There's an element of economy there, an element of trust, and an element of movement. People don't have infinite time available to search for some needle you claim is there. Then let's say you found that needle on page 97 of the platform or a comment in some speech: can you trust it, or is it insincerity fishing for some extra votes? It's also not like the party is standing still: today it might be officially against X, but very soon it might be for it or something like it.

That's why it's important to be loud. As an outsider, if the loudest voices on an issue in your coalition are unrepresentative but not put in their place, it makes it hard to trust the official position is true or will be maintained when it matters. If those voices are loudly and officially rebuked, the consequences and implications of that can build some trust in the official position, as well as making it easy to discover.