Is this surprising to anyone? There are numerous documented cases (some mentioned in this article), many anecdotal, of blatant discrimination against Asians at universities. [4]
Honestly when you look at the data, its hard to believe there has been no major backlash on a national level until this point, especially when you consider a majority believe there is discrimination against them [3]. One reason could perhaps be the fact that Asians outperform other groups on a variety of positive societal metrics (income, wealth, education). [1,2]
Anyway, whether or not you think we should or should not do anything about it is up to your political tastes, but I for one am at least happy its getting some national attention - given my own personal experience and just knowing what the data says. Admittedly, if the data looked a lot different I would be more inclined to rule this out as bogus.
Have you seen how Cal Tech which doesn’t look at race has double the Asian Americans roughly speaking than many other top schools? Just throwing that stat out there doesn’t prove anything about discrimination.
The number of college aged Asian Americans has been growing much faster than the number of Asian Americans admitted to Ivy League schools, which is quite suggestive of discrimination.
Discrimination is an act by one human against another. You can't tell just from looking at ratio of the broader Asian population and Harvard's Asian population whether or not they're discriminating. Human behavior is subtle, and when OP said that blatant discrimination was happening he was pretty obviously not referring to that ratio as the thing that makes it blatant.
Good, there shouldn't be any systemic race based acceptance criteria. It only increases racism and skepticism.
Imagine you have a Hispanic doctor, but you know that the MCAT score for a Hispanic to get into med school is lower than the score an Asian would need. Now you question whether your doctor is as qualified as they should be because of their race, even if they did have an amazing MCAT score.
Affirmative action is blatantly racist from all angles.
The government and private organizations have a history of using race to penalize and constrain certain specific groups in the U.S. Many of these race-based policy decisions continue to give compounding returns to groups who benefited from discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, Asians and indigenous people. Until the issue of compounding returns is fixed (i.e. equalized), having a "color blind" attitude will continue to uphold the effects of systemic racism.
This is a really good point that should not be ignored.
If being color blind upholds, and being color biased upholds. What should we do.
There’s a separate issue that if you think there isn’t systemic racism against Asian Americans then you may want to practice empathizing. So if there’s historic systemic racism against certain groups, isn’t it worse to identify some groups and turn the screws on them? A vengeance based social policy will be difficult to implement as the perpetrators already got theirs out of the education system and it will likely have lots of negative consequences and lead to a worse society.
Asians have higher incomes, higher educational achievement and longer expected lives than whites in the U.S.
The problem is not "compounding returns", it is genetics and, to a lesser extent, culture.
Until this fact, which most educated people know but are terrified to say aloud, is admitted and reckoned with, no progress will be made. This will hurt non-asian minorities the most.
now imagine the same resume being sent out to a number of companies: one with a white sounding name and one with a black sounding name. And imagine finding out that the same resume with the white sounding name gets more call backs? I'm going to assume it's the same thing if you replace white with east asian or south asian.
Now imagine the same thing again, but this time in the interview where one candidate has a mid western accent, and the other a deep southern one.
People use race as a proxy for class. But it isn't the only thing. And the more people pretend race is the deciding factor, and not class, the more shitty laws and rules we have in place trying to fix a symptom of a disease everyone wants to pretend isn't there.
The thing about GP's statement is that it's premised on the idea that it doesn't work in reverse: i.e. that the existing systemic racism that these policies are intended to offset don't likewise rob us of our best and brightest.
And, of course, that idea itself rests on the notion of an inherent superiority on one-side. To be clear, I don't believe that's part of the conscious thinking, but I do believe this oversight is illustrative of the kinds of blind-spots that tacitly guide a lot of thinking on these issues.
That's an unpopular thing to say but that doesn't make it any less true.
Agreed, I think a lot of people at this point are tired of identity divisions period and just want everyone to be treated the same regardless. It comes down to your principles in the end, I'm really hoping the culture moves in this direction though. Even though some minorities will not receive the same successful outcomes, I feel that indiscriminate treatment of people regardless of their race, gender, background at all levels of society and it's institutions is the only way forward as a collectively multicultural population.
Alternatively, I suppose this can help you select a doctor. Especially if board scores are also different based on race.
Of course this isn’t absolute as there are other factors to consider. But this is what I mean by saying these kinds of interventions increase racism. Since in your example this could lead to patients discriminating against Hispanic doctors.
The reason this is a hard problem is how do you fix it when the admissions people are racists?
Part of the reason these policies are based on race and not some other socioeconomic standard was to get around the problem that the people making the admission decisions were racist (or at least biased).
I seriously don't understand people who defend race-based admissions. It is, at best, an ends-justify-the-means argument where you're saying some forms of racism and stereotyping are acceptable. I'm aware of the argument that it is to offset systemic racism but it still boils down to assuming someone's life story based on the color of their skin.
I'm very pro-diversity but this is just too high a price to pay. Everyone in the rainbow classroom will look around and know that the bars were different. They just won't say it out loud for fear of social reprisals.
Furthermore, based on my college experiences, the issue with diversity in college isn't even the lack of it. It's the lack of integration. You still end up seeing the various racial groups sticking to themselves. Whatever benefits diversity brings is probably diluted until that is resolved.
You know what's funny? The entire college acceptance system is biased toward wealthy families. You need to have the right experiences (often bought with money, inordinate amount of time spent by parents, or both). You need to write your own letters, of course, with "help" by parents or professionals. You need to plan your courses years beforehand, again, with help by others. If your parents are working their asses off to make ends meet, you likely won't have much help.
The entire American system is set up to make it as easy as possible for wealthy kids to go to college.
Somehow I've yet to hear one wealthy family objecting "This hurts my kid, because he is completely able to enter college on his own, but thanks to the system it will look like he got in only because he's wealthy! Make the system more fair!"
Anybody who says Affirmative action actually "hurts" disadvantaged kids had better be able to explain the above discrepancy.
This is an interesting argument, but the article doesn’t say this at all. The complaint isn’t that affirmative action helps recipients, but that it hurts Asian Americans.
I suppose there are some people arguing against you, but it may be more productive to argue the point at hand.
Or at least we can all nod and agree that the net gain to recipients of affirmative action outweighs any negatives. And move on to the lawsuit’s question of “Why should Asian Americans suffer?”
I completely agree with your point about wealth being very important. But it’s not a good analogy to affirmative action based on some races. I’ve spent a bit of time in Ivy League schools and it’s still wealthy minorities who are the main benificiary of affirmative action. So wealth is a given for admission regardless of if you’re pro-AA or anti-.
But it sounds like all your complaints are about classism. Why not then look classism straight in the eye, rather than punishing young Asians looking to get into college?
So if Harvard systematically discriminates against certain races in their admissions process can lying about your race on an application be considered an act of civil disobedience? What's the difference between an Asian who wants to go to college saying they're black to get in and black children that wanted to go to white only schools during the civil rights movement? Why should either be denied an education based on their race? And then, if you're not ok with people lying about their race to gain admission what punishment should befall those that do lie? What should be done to those who commit race fraud?
What’s interesting about this is the difficulty of testing of someone is lying. Race isn’t purely genetic, so how do you call someone who is 40% Asian, 20% African, 40% European ancestry who looks “black” from identifying as African American?
What’s the threshold?
I really wanted the Rachel Dolezal to get into a court case somehow just to see what the legal ruling is.
If someone who is 99.99% ashkenazi and 0.01% African truly believes she is black, who is a Harvard admissions person to contract them?
Logically, this follows to a pretty weird place. With trends in census showing increase in multiracial populations, I hope it becomes a moot point before society goes full retard with “racial impurity” tests.
I'd imagine you wouldn't be lying. You'd be "identifying" as black. And while you're at it, identify as a black woman. It would throw the whole system into chaos (until people start profiling based on names).
While I am not against the idea of Affirmative Action as a whole, some more thought needs to be put into fairly creating its classifications.
Discussions about breaking down ethnic data into more granular countries and incorporating more socioeconomic factors need to be more strongly considered before implementing something like this.
Eg. The median Indian American isn't the same as the median Vietnamese American. And neither are the opportunities for kids growing up in two different cities in America.
This maybe offtopic so I apologize in advance but when people say "Asian-Americans" does it include South Asians as well or just East Asians? As a south asian this has caused me a lot of confusion while talking to people in bay area
In social situations, "Asians" generally refers to East Asians. However, most official demographic-checklists don't have an option for "South-Asian", and expect them to self-identify as "Asian". Hence, much of the evidence you see from the above lawsuit, likely applies to South Asians as well.
I love when forms mix racial terms and have the options “Asian” and “Caucasian.” Mixing races based on recent geographic origin with races based on morphology can lead to broad interpretation. South-Asians are actually Caucasian if you believe in the racial theory that has three races- caucasoid, mongoloid, negroid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race) because they were big on bone structure over skin tone.
But for the most part these racial distinctions are all pretty hokey and you can check whatever you want. I’m not sure why it’s more valid to classify by skin tone vs hair color vs hand width or whatever. I can understand the unjust classification within certain cultures in isolation because it probably closely associated with certain classes or religions.
But classifying a black-skinned Indian South Asian and a brown-skinned Ethiopian (both also Caucasian) makes no real sense. Even from a social justice persective as which background has it worse off?
Is a light-skinned African-American have more or less systematic oppression than a dark-skinned South Asian? Or a dark-skinned AA vs a light-skinned SA?
There’s all sorts of interesting and confusing scenarios. I’m not sure what to do nor what is right, so I largely just muffle up and/or wait for the loudest shouting groups to figure it out.
Things did not go well for an immigrant friend of mine who was white South African who signed up for an African American law program. But when the all white engineering team won the state championship challenge for minority schools, that was fine. It was a weird quirk in my country where the program was for schools with majority minority students. But most schools had almost entirely Asian and white teams because the schools had small non-minority populations.
When people in the US say "Asian" conversationally, they usually mean "East Asian". The admissions process uses the more formal definition, which means an American who can trace his/her ethnicity to any country in Asia (including India, etc).
Readit News
Honestly when you look at the data, its hard to believe there has been no major backlash on a national level until this point, especially when you consider a majority believe there is discrimination against them [3]. One reason could perhaps be the fact that Asians outperform other groups on a variety of positive societal metrics (income, wealth, education). [1,2]
Anyway, whether or not you think we should or should not do anything about it is up to your political tastes, but I for one am at least happy its getting some national attention - given my own personal experience and just knowing what the data says. Admittedly, if the data looked a lot different I would be more inclined to rule this out as bogus.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
3. https://www.npr.org/assets/news/2017/12/discriminationpoll-a...
4. http://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discrimination...
So you mention "knowing what the data says" -
* Asian Americans represent 5.6% of the US population[1].
* The most recently admitted class at Harvard was 22.7% Asian American.
Is that "blatant discrimination"? If it is, at what percentage would it not be?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_American... [2]: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/3/29/harvard-regular-...
But the idea that Harvard admissions is purely merit based is a joke, so this is very hard to pin down.
Imagine you have a Hispanic doctor, but you know that the MCAT score for a Hispanic to get into med school is lower than the score an Asian would need. Now you question whether your doctor is as qualified as they should be because of their race, even if they did have an amazing MCAT score.
Affirmative action is blatantly racist from all angles.
If being color blind upholds, and being color biased upholds. What should we do.
There’s a separate issue that if you think there isn’t systemic racism against Asian Americans then you may want to practice empathizing. So if there’s historic systemic racism against certain groups, isn’t it worse to identify some groups and turn the screws on them? A vengeance based social policy will be difficult to implement as the perpetrators already got theirs out of the education system and it will likely have lots of negative consequences and lead to a worse society.
The problem is not "compounding returns", it is genetics and, to a lesser extent, culture.
Until this fact, which most educated people know but are terrified to say aloud, is admitted and reckoned with, no progress will be made. This will hurt non-asian minorities the most.
People use race as a proxy for class. But it isn't the only thing. And the more people pretend race is the deciding factor, and not class, the more shitty laws and rules we have in place trying to fix a symptom of a disease everyone wants to pretend isn't there.
And, of course, that idea itself rests on the notion of an inherent superiority on one-side. To be clear, I don't believe that's part of the conscious thinking, but I do believe this oversight is illustrative of the kinds of blind-spots that tacitly guide a lot of thinking on these issues.
That's an unpopular thing to say but that doesn't make it any less true.
Of course this isn’t absolute as there are other factors to consider. But this is what I mean by saying these kinds of interventions increase racism. Since in your example this could lead to patients discriminating against Hispanic doctors.
There shouldn't be any systemic race-based anything.
Unfortunately, however, there is.
Part of the reason these policies are based on race and not some other socioeconomic standard was to get around the problem that the people making the admission decisions were racist (or at least biased).
But I also think it's a fallacy that one's professional performance is highly correlated with their acceptance scores.
Racists probably question.
I'm very pro-diversity but this is just too high a price to pay. Everyone in the rainbow classroom will look around and know that the bars were different. They just won't say it out loud for fear of social reprisals.
Furthermore, based on my college experiences, the issue with diversity in college isn't even the lack of it. It's the lack of integration. You still end up seeing the various racial groups sticking to themselves. Whatever benefits diversity brings is probably diluted until that is resolved.
The entire American system is set up to make it as easy as possible for wealthy kids to go to college.
Somehow I've yet to hear one wealthy family objecting "This hurts my kid, because he is completely able to enter college on his own, but thanks to the system it will look like he got in only because he's wealthy! Make the system more fair!"
Anybody who says Affirmative action actually "hurts" disadvantaged kids had better be able to explain the above discrepancy.
I'm OK with Affirmative action.
I suppose there are some people arguing against you, but it may be more productive to argue the point at hand.
Or at least we can all nod and agree that the net gain to recipients of affirmative action outweighs any negatives. And move on to the lawsuit’s question of “Why should Asian Americans suffer?”
I completely agree with your point about wealth being very important. But it’s not a good analogy to affirmative action based on some races. I’ve spent a bit of time in Ivy League schools and it’s still wealthy minorities who are the main benificiary of affirmative action. So wealth is a given for admission regardless of if you’re pro-AA or anti-.
https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
What’s the threshold?
I really wanted the Rachel Dolezal to get into a court case somehow just to see what the legal ruling is.
If someone who is 99.99% ashkenazi and 0.01% African truly believes she is black, who is a Harvard admissions person to contract them?
Logically, this follows to a pretty weird place. With trends in census showing increase in multiracial populations, I hope it becomes a moot point before society goes full retard with “racial impurity” tests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
I like to check random boxes. Given the precarious definition of race one could probably argue they belong to any race.
Discussions about breaking down ethnic data into more granular countries and incorporating more socioeconomic factors need to be more strongly considered before implementing something like this.
Eg. The median Indian American isn't the same as the median Vietnamese American. And neither are the opportunities for kids growing up in two different cities in America.
But for the most part these racial distinctions are all pretty hokey and you can check whatever you want. I’m not sure why it’s more valid to classify by skin tone vs hair color vs hand width or whatever. I can understand the unjust classification within certain cultures in isolation because it probably closely associated with certain classes or religions.
But classifying a black-skinned Indian South Asian and a brown-skinned Ethiopian (both also Caucasian) makes no real sense. Even from a social justice persective as which background has it worse off?
Is a light-skinned African-American have more or less systematic oppression than a dark-skinned South Asian? Or a dark-skinned AA vs a light-skinned SA?
There’s all sorts of interesting and confusing scenarios. I’m not sure what to do nor what is right, so I largely just muffle up and/or wait for the loudest shouting groups to figure it out.
Things did not go well for an immigrant friend of mine who was white South African who signed up for an African American law program. But when the all white engineering team won the state championship challenge for minority schools, that was fine. It was a weird quirk in my country where the program was for schools with majority minority students. But most schools had almost entirely Asian and white teams because the schools had small non-minority populations.