The hyperventilation over this case is particularly absurd because the court specifically allows applicants to get a boost if they describe in their essay how their racial identity has contributed to their character development and resilience. It just means they have to articulate WHY they deserve the boost, rather than getting it automatically. Honestly, if they can’t manage that, they don’t deserve the bump and certainly don’t belong at Harvard.
I know the one that you're thinking of, and first, the answer is no. But second, I have no fucking idea what possible connection this could have to trans issues. At all. It's such a bizarre reach. But so many of you are such dedicated obsessives that you'll fit ANYTHING I write into that frame, with no sense or meaning at all. It's fucking madness and I advise you all to seek help.
I promise, I will ban anyone for life who chooses to test me today.
I think affirmative action in elite universities is valuable, but not for the reasons you're arguing against. I don't think it helps the quality of education much at all. The fact is that teenagers hardly ever have anything interesting to say regardless of their background, or at least they didn't in any of my sections. If you want an interesting perspective, read a book!
The value of affirmative action in elite universities is that it leads to a more diverse ruling elite. This is important because it increases the likelihood that when the elite make decisions that everybody else has to live by, that they take into account the needs of these underrepresented groups. If you think this is just a theoretical concern, there's actually pretty good empirical evidence which uses scheduled casts and tribes in India and gender requirements in Scandinavia in order to tease out the effects of affirmative action on decision-making by elites. Turns out these effects are quite large. Go figure!
yes I'm aware with "Black people should be equally represented on the board of a defense manufacturer that sells depleted uranium to Saudi Arabia" is an argument that exists, but it has nothing to do with my politics or project
I am not interested in the rainbow oligarchy, thanks
Maybe I'm being too cynical but it seems like that's the only path that's open. We can't even get a guarantee of school lunch and school supplies. The public just doesn't care how inequitable schools are and so we can either adjust so there's an extremely narrow path to elite black and latin people or have virtually none but that's it.
I wonder if sex and scheduled castes are more coherent and essential categories than race in modern America. Like, a woman can speak for women in a way a black cannot speak for the blacks. With women, the share the experience of being smaller, periods, pregnancy, and other general dispositions. With blacks, you’ve got differences in color, white admixture, class, even ancestry (eg, Kenya, Jamaica, or ADOS).
Caste is more interesting, but from what I’ve read, long-standing endogamy and ritual exclusion create a very related and strongly mutually identified group.
Even with sex, if I’m choosing which politicians I’d rather have making decisions about (e.g.) my access to healthcare, I’d rather have a liberal man than Sarah Palin. Even though she and I are both women, having someone represent me who shares my politics is more important.
And then there’s the failure mode Chris Jesu Lee’s posts mention: when Asian elites are unwilling or unable to speak up for Asians, either because they fear getting cancelled for white-adjacent supremacy or whatever, or because they just have an attitude of “I got mine, f@&$ the rest of you!”
I'm a guy, so I say this with great caution, but one thing I feel confident I've learned over the years is that women are in fact individual people, with their own personal interests, foibles, and politics.
Haha I definitely agree, I was just meant that “women” is a more coherent category than “blacks”, not that it would be a good idea to have female board members to represent “women”. I feel like that would be dumb and applying the principle to race in American would be even dumber!!!
Interesting point, but Obama's Kenyan ancestry (no, I am not playing birther here!) and relatively privileged upbringing meant that, other than skin tone, he had little in common with the experience of the average frustrated American black.
Didn't matter. Obama had near universal approval among blacks, and any deviation was blasphemy.
I think that's a much stronger argument than "diversity is good for education." Though of course, as with any elite class, once folks get in there, their values tend to become quite similar to the other members of their class, regardless of where the came from.
But, ceteris paribus, if we've got to have an elite ruling class, I'd prefer to have one that comes from a wider variety of backgrounds rather than a narrower one. I think it's probably much better to have both Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, instead of nine Brett Kavanaughs.
The problem is whether or not you get real diversity if all of the black, brown and white people come from the same economic class and thus all share the same values.
I think you could make the argument that what's at stake here is diversity of skin color but not actual diversity in terms of thought or philosophy. If you really want somebody that reflects blue collar values in office, well, that's Trump.
This sounds a lot like "trickle down" theory to me - if we reward a small number of diverse folks by granting them access to positions of power, they will lift up others with their empathetic decision-making. No thanks.
Not necessarily refuting your point, but the caste quota system in India is why so many high-achieving Brahmins ended up taking job offers from the US in the 80s/90s and are now the richest racial demographic in the country, with many in major leadership roles (especially in tech).
I’m not saying that therefore caste quotas are wrong. Just that it may have created a sort of “brain drain” in India, to the benefit of the US. Then again who knows; I won’t pretend to have researched this stuff thoroughly.
This is true. Although it’s not just Brahmins, it’s the other upper castes who emigrated as well. And also, sadly why discrimination laws in CA are now having to include ‘prohibition of discrimination on the basis of caste’ in their laws.
Can someone kindly expand on this statement please? I am unclear.
“Then has the turn in the past half-century towards defining college as primarily an engine of social justice and economic mobility, advanced by politicians antagonistic to the labor movement that had traditionally served those ends, not fundamentally been a bargain with the devil for higher education?”
When college stopped being about instilling civic values, cultivating virtue, educating for education's sake, and developing more fully-realized human beings, and instead became assumed to be a tool for a) personal economic advancement and b) social justice, it wrote a big check it could never cash.
I didn't learn about Glaucon in school, which may be why I always confuse Glaucon with Glycon the snake-god (which is a hilarious story in and of itself).
I feel like having a racially diverse elite is worthwhile because these institutions involve choosing who is in the aristocracy that ends up with power and people aren't really willing to do the much harder job of fixing the pipeline, or however you would end credentialism.
So instead we just fix it post hoc by allowing a few minorities into elite colleges who go on to be black politicians, business leaders and judges etc and we don't worry about the masses because people won't stand for the much bigger root and branch project that is.
Look at the money that votech schools get in the US compared to Germany or Japan. Now compare that to the money spend on four year universities.
Do you really think that a rainbow coalition of minorities who went to a four year university--and not a vocational college for AC repair--is going to change that?
It's not a pittance. Although I do think we should have vocational training centers. And the federal government funds loans. I think in terms of actual grants votech does pretty well with the Perkins funding. Not sure the comparison. I'm just saying it's nonsense to say we don't spend much. We spend a lot. There's not kids sitting around saying I can't get training.
It's a pittance compared to the amount of spending on four year programs which is symptomatic of a wider devaluation of blue collar jobs. That is why kids poo poo blue collar work even as a significant minority of college graduates toil away in restaurants and retail sales.
Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote in The New Yorker about how we don't hear from Asian Americans on this topic, even though they're supposed to be the plaintiffs. That's not exactly true, though. We do hear a lot from a certain type of Asian American: the one who has received his or her elite education and is now fighting tooth and nail to protect the good reputations of Harvard Inc. & Co. This is the standard-issue Asian American voice in the media, academia, non-profit world, etc.
Nothing exposes the sheer social-clubbiness value of not only elite education, but also the elite progressive definition of diversity (i.e. a diversity's that's focused exclusively on racial diversity in the upper—and upper-aspiring—classes) than this fact. We're supposed to accept this definition of diversity as an unassailable social good, but who benefits the most and who pays the most? Among Asian Americans, those who benefit the most are those who get into these schools and have their elite statuses protected by the shield of racial progress. Furthermore, this model of diversity results in an intense intra-racial social competition to be one of the few select elite representatives of your group, to escape the Chinatown Social Ghetto, figuratively speaking. If you're an Asian American with a Harvard degree, you are among these winners, and for your continued social and professional benefit, you're demanding that even a working-class Asian American with absolutely no connections or wealth, and who only has a raggedly old SAT practice test book as a social ladder, to sacrifice themselves for you. And YOU get to be hailed as the enlightened champion of racial progress?
PS If you ever read novels about the modern undergraduate college experience, it's obvious that the value of an elite college is for the socially ambitious American non-elite to climb their way into the elite (I also wrote about it in my Substack). That's what it all comes down to, whether people will admit it or not. The hyper-exclusive nature of these schools plainly admits what their purpose is, but so many people, especially elite progressives, try so hard to protect their own self-image by denying that. This shouldn't be a left vs. right issue. Ultimately, it's about whether or not you can stomach such blatant self-serving hypocrisy.
I mean, that's a far broader dynamic, right? It's a rite of passage now for people who have excelled in meritocracy to disdain it as soon as they're done with securing their place.
A few weeks ago, you posted something about how empty it was for the publishing industry to praise novels that supposedly ruthlessly criticized the publishing industry. Same principle there, right? Books like Yellowface and The Other Black Girl, both of which were lavished with acclaim by the very industries they were supposed to eviscerate! When that happens, you've probably failed as an incisive critic. Nobody should enjoy being genuinely criticized. Certainly not the thin-skinned publishing/media field. I plan on writing about those novels later.
Kind of like how people with obviously high IQs loudly denounce the existence of IQs. Is it possible they recognize that their advantages are unearned and feel guilty about it? Fascinating dynamic
I'm trying to square the Asian critique of these institutions with their roles as gatekeepers to aristocracy and I'm not sure I find it easy to understand. Like doing well in high school is supposed to get you the advanced inside track on all positions of power without any limiting principles at all? We should just blindly hand over the cabinet, judiciary, finance and tech to people based solely on how well they did in high school?
No, we should create really democratic institutions and enforce a social stigma against people who choose to go to anti-democratic "elite" institutions instead.
But there's no interest in those kinds of things. I'm literally in the process of begging my friends and family for pencils and crayons and granola bars so when inevitably some of my students can't afford school supplies and snacks I can help them.
People don't want to change things, even little tiny amounts of money things so that everyone has a fair chance to do equally well at school but you think they're going to do large transformative shifts in a time frame fast enough for the next graduating class of seniors?
What would most likely happen if (let’s pretend) we could abolish elite private schools and make college more “democratic” is that we end up with something like the French system, which is “public” but no less elitist, because the admissions process is so rigorous, it ends up creating a similar meritocratic elite in the civil service, the professions, etc. I’m genuinely curious what a more democratic system ends up looking like. It’s not just about admissions: you could let everyone into Cornell or Yale, and most would flunk out. Is that an efficient use of resources? This isn’t discussed very often, but 2nd-tier state schools are pretty democratic in that they accept almost anyone, and then have 6-year drop out rates of like 40%.
The Canadian public university system has its faults, but isn't elitist in the same way as the American college system. While there are some minor differences in terms of particularly competitive programs or more pretentious students, and some schools are known to be more rigorous than others, the undergraduate experience is more or less the same. Acceptance rates range around 40-60%. With some exceptions, admissions are based solely on your grades. I got admitted to 6 out of the 7 schools I applied to, but probably wouldn't have made the cut for the Ivies. The 7 year graduation rate ranges pretty widely, though -- between 40-90%, depending on the school.
I graduated from the University of Toronto, which is one of the "fancier" schools in the country (or at least one that has a high opinion of itself), but it also has an undergraduate population of 43,000. A friend of mine who later went to Harvard Law said that from what he heard from his classmates, Ivies are much harder to get into than U of T, but much easier to do well once you're there.
In terms of the effect this has on our elite class, only one out of our four federal party leaders went to a fancy school. Provincially, our Premier dropped out of community college after two months. While our largest city was governed by a business scion of the Laurentian Elite for far too long, our brand new mayor graduated with an art degree from an agricultural school, and it was never an issue. The school that is the biggest producer of journalists was, 30 years ago, a community college.
Some schools are better than others in certain fields, which leads to better connections with students or profs, placement opportunities, or recruitment opportunities. But ultimately nobody gives a shit where you went to school once you're done.
I gather that UofT doesn’t release public diversity statistics, but what would you say the approximate racial breakdown was when you attended? I see 2021 figures from McGill that the combined white and East/South Asian enrollment is over 86%. I think this is relevant because in a thread where we’re talking about more “democratic” universities, many people are going to assume that’s also a proxy for “racially diverse.”
My experience of it a decade ago was my classmates were predominantly white, East Asian, and South Asian. But Toronto itself is 75-80% white and East/South Asian, and a third of U of T's undergraduate population are international students (with about 2/3rds of those coming from China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). The downtown campus is also different, demographically, than the Mississauga (more Asian) and Scarborough (more Black) campuses. The racial demographics also varied pretty widely depending on your major.
But I don't think a university system that is more "democratic" is necessarily a proxy for more racially diverse or vice versa.
I don't want these institutions to be such influential gatekeepers, period. I don't want so many SCOTUS justices to be from Yale Law, so many journalists to be from Columbia, so many screenwriters to be Harvard Lampoon alums, so many Wall St. bankers to be from Penn, etc.
But if the argument is that these elite schools should indeed be such gatekeepers (and as far as I know, only a radical few are advocating for dissolving the power of elite colleges), then how is it more defensible to rely on some adcoms' nebulous ideologies of a justly diverse society than more standardized measures that are more transparent and accessible?
Elite colleges should either be aristocratic finishing schools or merit-based brain factories. The problem is that today's conscientious elite wants to have it both ways: they want the preserve the clubbiness of the elite college, but also the moral capital of merit. So they simply redefine merit to be whatever an ideologically aligned Harvard adcom wants and if you question that, then you're a racist.
I think the Kendiist intutition is a more correct one here where everyone in life will do fine in basic quality of life terms but we're only talking about the chance to enter the nobility than the grades and SAT rat race. The composition of Harvard should do as much as possible to simultaneously be excellent and composed as close as possible to America. There's 5-10 institutions which are just very unusual in that nearly everyone who applies deserves to be there and can't because their job isn't educational it's to pick an aristocracy.
I think the merit based one is more fit for tier 1 state schools which are about admission to the affluent. Tier 1 state schools are where we get the vast majority of our upper middle class and that ought be more of an educationally focused one. I think top % type plans and some sort of objective criteria make a lot of sense here is there just isn't that much of a floor and even those pushed out can do very well.
Okay, if the composition of elite colleges should reflect America's population, why just stop at race? How many of the black American population is working-class? How many of them are religious? Shouldn't Harvard's student body not only be X% black, but also within that black student body, X% should also be from lower-income families, from religious backgrounds, etc. to most accurately reflect the black American demographic?
I suspect there won't be much enthusiasm for this among many of the elite progressive defenders of Harvard's race-conscious admissions. There was a recent Atlantic piece that said class-based affirmative action was insufficient because the black middle-class would be unfairly left out.
That gets at the heart of what this is really about: an intra-elite partitioning of power and influence that uses the real problems suffered by poor minorities, especially poor black people, so that their supposed elite representatives can even things up a bit with their elite peers.
So if the critical principle is to be "composed as close as possible to America," then let's fully go all the way and introduce other key demographic aspects like class, religion, and political beliefs within a racial group too.
Something like 50% of Silicon Valley tech workers are Asian, far outstripping their share of the general population.
Given the influence and prestige of that field would you also argue that it should look like the country at large? If so what's the solution other than firing a bunch of Asians and trying to recruit more blacks, Hispanics--and whites?
As I mentioned the other time you brought up this state, Asians aren't overrepresented in the high status tech work jobs in the Bay Area. They do a lot of the slog H1B worik. And if lots of blacks and Hispanics had tech degrees, then there would be far more pressure for the industry to look like the country at large and yes, it would mean hiring fewer Asians, particularly H1Bs.
Since colleges are probably going to drop standards altogether and pressure professors to pass students no matter what, who knows? There might be more blacks and Hispanics with tech degrees.
There's no such thing as "slog" H1B work. I have known two guys who worked for themselves and charged $400 an hour. One was a Hadoop specialist who worked for Walmart. The other was an Indian guy who worked with Oracle.
There's a reason Asians earn more than every other racial classification in the country, including whites, and it's largely tied to higher than average numbers of college grads in high paying fields like tech.
"Since colleges are probably going to drop standards altogether and pressure professors to pass students no matter what, who knows? There might be more blacks and Hispanics with tech degrees."
A degree is no guarantee of ability to actually do the job. Maybe back before the Fed jacked up interest rates companies would be more willing to hire useless appendages but those days are gone now.
The colleges that *actually* end up “looking like America” are the service academies like West Point and Annapolis, where each state sends X number of students. I’ve yet to see anyone propose this for the Ivies.
Chris I definitely agree with your critiques of the Ivies (and since you are an Ivy graduate) admire your willingness to bite the hand that fed you. But... how much of the gatekeeping role is on the Ivies? I mean- no one is holding a gun to Wall Street and the top consulting companies and forcing them to recruit almost exclusively from the Ivies, Hollywood doesn’t have to hire ONLY from the Harvard Lampoon, and the president can pick whoever he or she wants to be on the Supreme Court. Downstream institutions have the power to break this stranglehold- they just have to use it.
What incentive do they have? Of course these institutions want to keep recruiting people that are just like them despite surface protests about diversity. Why wouldn't they?
In the case of Wall Street, to make more money? My go to example was after Samsung started aggressively competing with Apple in the smartphone market and pretty much all of Wall Street decided that Apple was doomed and it was just a matter of time. There were three prominent public commentators who publicly disagreed - John Gruber (graduate of Drexel University), Ben Thompson (graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison) and Horace Dediu - graduate of some college in Finland (he’s Finnish). None of them ever would have been hired by Wall Street due to their academic pedigrees, but if Wall Street had had them or people like them they perhaps wouldn’t have missed the Apple call and made more money. Yeah yeah, I know, principal agent problem, but Wall Street at least is supposedly super rapacious right? <arms up emoji>
If I work at a large Wall Street bank why do I care about how much money the bank makes on a macro scale as long as it's enough to prevent layoffs?
On the other hand if I hire a bunch of people from the same club my individual status in that club rises. Plus my membership in the club has twisted my thinking so I believe that only other people in the club are capable of original or innovative thinking.
"But... how much of the gatekeeping role is on the Ivies? I mean- no one is holding a gun to Wall Street and the top consulting companies and forcing them to recruit almost exclusively from the Ivies, Hollywood doesn’t have to hire ONLY from the Harvard Lampoon, and the president can pick whoever he or she wants to be on the Supreme Court. "
These institutions want employees that seek to please authority and have a demonstrated ability to do so. In the case of the Supreme Court, that's pretty much the main qualification for the job.
Not only that, but these institutions have the budgets and cultural cachet to be able to pick and choose.
But the population of boys who aren't slacker morons in high school is huge in a country of 330 million people. That may be too bad for those specific individuals but at the societal level it's probably not going to be a problem.
They aren't in fact morons. They are very bright and don't care about grades. And at a societal level, that already is a problem as we reward grinds and swots over actual intelligence.
If they don't care about grades why should they care about solving traffic jams or more efficient power plants or any of the other problems society faces?
I think college as job training is a terrible idea in terms of fostering income inequality. But the idea that "creativity" can be taught instead of arising organically is completely suspect.
Yes there is. The lowest scoring Harvard applicants basically fit this profile already. We’re talking about the difference between should this person be very successful in life or should this person be very successful in life with a path to really stratospheric power or not between people who will all be able to do the work.
But should one or two b’s in life be fully disqualifying for a person whose parents were maybe more libertarian with their child’s leisure time or should it only be tiger moms and traditional elites.
The alternative is to turn away better qualified candidates in favor of the lesser qualified. What's the point of trying to gauge academic achievement in the first place if the results are going to be discarded?
The test isn't perfect but the alternatives are worse in the sense that they are easily abused and manipulated.
Because Harvard and a small number of elite universities are about status and only status. They’re not about being 2 percent smarter they’re about being gatekeepers to the nobility. George W. Bush was fine to go to Yale and Harvard business school because he was there to learn to be in charge not to discover new things no one has ever discovered.
So isn't implementing a more impartial standard--like test scores--actually a move to dismantle that system?
Forcing Harvard to take the offspring of a waiter at a Chinese restaurant who scored 1600 on their SAT's doesn't provide racial diversity but it does inject somebody into the system who didn't grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth.
I know this is not the point of your analogy but I was just visiting the Whitney Plantation and they discussed how house slave life was very bad in a different way. Those people had to live right next to the big house, so slavers had access to them all hours of the day. They endured more sexual assault from the master’s family and guests. They were less able to socialize freely in the evenings.
I feel like the better analogy would be the slave driver? They got special privileges more often in return for being the overseer’s right hand man.
The basic claim is that Asian-American profs and others in the elite academic / activist / nonprofit complex are much more assimilated into white liberal culture than Asian critics of the meritocratic system.
To be fair, it's a really perplexing question. Who's more assimilated and white-adjacent?
(1) The Harvard-educated Asian American who works in a white-dominated culture-class field (like academia, media, entertainment, etc.), has a white spouse, lives in Brooklyn Heights and/or Newport Beach, loves Succession, and has a subscription to The New Yorker?
Or
(2) The Asian American who lives in all-Asian enclave in working-class neighborhood or wealthy suburbs, is married to another Asian and mostly has Asian social circle, doesn't even know what NPR stands for, and watches mostly Asian entertainment or "normie" American media that never gets any coverage in NY Mag?
"If you're an Asian American with a Harvard degree, you are among these winners, and for your continued social and professional benefit, you're demanding that even a working-class Asian American with absolutely no connections or wealth, and who only has a raggedly old SAT practice test book as a social ladder, to sacrifice themselves for you. And YOU get to be hailed as the enlightened champion of racial progress?"
Now do the admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School, where the furious Asians suing the school district are mad because a race neutral policy dropped Asian admission from 76 to 50 percent--but a *lot* more poor Asians.
They're not supposed to consider race, so why do you care if they devalue test scores in favor of taking the top kids from each school? Race is irrelevant.
"[I]t's obvious that the value of an elite college is for the socially ambitious American non-elite to climb their way into the elite...whether people will admit it or not."
Do many people dispute this? I feel like this is a widely accepted view. It's not a bad thing. There are, of course, many other ladders in American society available to talented people, but no one should be upset that this particular ladder also exists.
Perhaps trivial, but I wonder whether white elites are really uncomfortable in all-white spaces. I feel like, subjectively, no, they are fine in all white spaces. Rather, they are uncomfortable in that other white elites will attack them for being “racist” if they don’t have some tokens around. So much white drama pretending to be social justice.
White elites are totally comfortable in all-white spaces. They live and work in all white spaces with carefully curated and selected non-whites.
Before you blame them, remember that (as Chris points out above) Asians in America live in comparative cocoons, far more homogenous than elite whites. But then, so do most blacks and most Hispanics.
I can identify only two groups that are accustomed to life where they aren't the majority. The first group is the carefully curated and selected non-white elites, as well as the occasional Asian living in Iowa, or the rich black kid living in Saratoga. But these people don't learn to live in diversity. They live in white folk world, because that's the world they are planted in.
The only group of folks who are genuinely used to real diversity is mostly white, although some blacks can end up here as well. These are people who are middle class, not rich enough to enclave with whites and not enough middle class whites to enclave themselves because they live in high immigration areas. They live in areas where the Asians and Hispanics are split into their nationalities for test scores. They know all about diversity, and think liberal whites yammering about diversity are about as clueless as conservative whites and Asians bitching about Asian discrimination, and think everyone should shut up if they live in a town or their kids attend school where any race is above 50%.
The problem with the test at Harvard was that it mysteriously rated Asians as deficient in characteristics like "courage", "likeability", etc.
How does that not draw directly from cultural tropes that cast Asians as robotic drones? How is that not racist?
What the middle class believes in is one standard for everyone. Polling has shown large majorities of the public that are opposed to affirmative action.
I think most of the negative reactions from the progressive social justice crowd about this ruling come down to: oh look, another ruling we don't like from the big, bad conservative Supreme Court.
For the record, I generally don't agree with conservatives, but I think they got this one (AA) correct.
Furthermore, I think that if HRC hadn't insulted the entire white working class, then perhaps the court would look a lot different today.
Getting way off topic, but if HRC had acted just a little less entitled, treated the 2016 election a little less like her personal coronation, maybe even bothered to campaign in WI, MI and PA, she'd have won in 2016.
Then again, HRC has a powerful anticharisma, as she is not good at disguising her obvious disdain for ordinary people, so maybe she was wise to stay in Calinfor-I-A and yukk it up with the donors.
Great argument, my summation, the Liberal loves a placebo. Affirmative action may have began as something important but in these last decades it has been a sugar pill. The Liberal loves a sugar pill. For instance: we are bringing democracy and freedom to the Ukraine. Tastes good! It’s fashionable: the shitlib’s virtue affectation.
Primarily leftism is lazy. It once was something, but now it is a parody. That beast that slouches towards Bethlehem, in Yates’ poem The Second Coming, to my surprise, is liberalism. I honestly didn’t see that coming.
spot on freddie
May I now profess this logic without being called racist? Or even worse, a conservative?
That is strictly prohibited.
No. Logic is a white male tool intended to oppress minorities and women.
The only true path is to just stop caring about being called racist
The only people who don't care about being called racist are racists!
So be it!
#racismiscool #whynotracism
Good one.
The hyperventilation over this case is particularly absurd because the court specifically allows applicants to get a boost if they describe in their essay how their racial identity has contributed to their character development and resilience. It just means they have to articulate WHY they deserve the boost, rather than getting it automatically. Honestly, if they can’t manage that, they don’t deserve the bump and certainly don’t belong at Harvard.
No one really belongs at Harvard
Brilliant! Thank you Freddie
Can we now apply this same logic to a couple of other topics? I won't say which ones I'm thinking of.
I know the one that you're thinking of, and first, the answer is no. But second, I have no fucking idea what possible connection this could have to trans issues. At all. It's such a bizarre reach. But so many of you are such dedicated obsessives that you'll fit ANYTHING I write into that frame, with no sense or meaning at all. It's fucking madness and I advise you all to seek help.
I promise, I will ban anyone for life who chooses to test me today.
I think affirmative action in elite universities is valuable, but not for the reasons you're arguing against. I don't think it helps the quality of education much at all. The fact is that teenagers hardly ever have anything interesting to say regardless of their background, or at least they didn't in any of my sections. If you want an interesting perspective, read a book!
The value of affirmative action in elite universities is that it leads to a more diverse ruling elite. This is important because it increases the likelihood that when the elite make decisions that everybody else has to live by, that they take into account the needs of these underrepresented groups. If you think this is just a theoretical concern, there's actually pretty good empirical evidence which uses scheduled casts and tribes in India and gender requirements in Scandinavia in order to tease out the effects of affirmative action on decision-making by elites. Turns out these effects are quite large. Go figure!
yes I'm aware with "Black people should be equally represented on the board of a defense manufacturer that sells depleted uranium to Saudi Arabia" is an argument that exists, but it has nothing to do with my politics or project
I am not interested in the rainbow oligarchy, thanks
Maybe I'm being too cynical but it seems like that's the only path that's open. We can't even get a guarantee of school lunch and school supplies. The public just doesn't care how inequitable schools are and so we can either adjust so there's an extremely narrow path to elite black and latin people or have virtually none but that's it.
I wonder if sex and scheduled castes are more coherent and essential categories than race in modern America. Like, a woman can speak for women in a way a black cannot speak for the blacks. With women, the share the experience of being smaller, periods, pregnancy, and other general dispositions. With blacks, you’ve got differences in color, white admixture, class, even ancestry (eg, Kenya, Jamaica, or ADOS).
Caste is more interesting, but from what I’ve read, long-standing endogamy and ritual exclusion create a very related and strongly mutually identified group.
Even with sex, if I’m choosing which politicians I’d rather have making decisions about (e.g.) my access to healthcare, I’d rather have a liberal man than Sarah Palin. Even though she and I are both women, having someone represent me who shares my politics is more important.
And then there’s the failure mode Chris Jesu Lee’s posts mention: when Asian elites are unwilling or unable to speak up for Asians, either because they fear getting cancelled for white-adjacent supremacy or whatever, or because they just have an attitude of “I got mine, f@&$ the rest of you!”
I'm a guy, so I say this with great caution, but one thing I feel confident I've learned over the years is that women are in fact individual people, with their own personal interests, foibles, and politics.
Haha I definitely agree, I was just meant that “women” is a more coherent category than “blacks”, not that it would be a good idea to have female board members to represent “women”. I feel like that would be dumb and applying the principle to race in American would be even dumber!!!
"Like, a woman can speak for women in a way a black cannot speak for the blacks."
A delusion that was shattered when Obama ran against Hillary. Black women identify first and foremost as black.
I agree that they often identify that way. But they don’t have much in common, despite how they feel.
Interesting point, but Obama's Kenyan ancestry (no, I am not playing birther here!) and relatively privileged upbringing meant that, other than skin tone, he had little in common with the experience of the average frustrated American black.
Didn't matter. Obama had near universal approval among blacks, and any deviation was blasphemy.
Hey, it's almost like black women identified first and foremost as black.
I think that's a much stronger argument than "diversity is good for education." Though of course, as with any elite class, once folks get in there, their values tend to become quite similar to the other members of their class, regardless of where the came from.
But, ceteris paribus, if we've got to have an elite ruling class, I'd prefer to have one that comes from a wider variety of backgrounds rather than a narrower one. I think it's probably much better to have both Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, instead of nine Brett Kavanaughs.
I believe the plural of Brett Kavanaugh is Bretts Kavanaugh.
The problem is whether or not you get real diversity if all of the black, brown and white people come from the same economic class and thus all share the same values.
I think you could make the argument that what's at stake here is diversity of skin color but not actual diversity in terms of thought or philosophy. If you really want somebody that reflects blue collar values in office, well, that's Trump.
This sounds a lot like "trickle down" theory to me - if we reward a small number of diverse folks by granting them access to positions of power, they will lift up others with their empathetic decision-making. No thanks.
Not necessarily refuting your point, but the caste quota system in India is why so many high-achieving Brahmins ended up taking job offers from the US in the 80s/90s and are now the richest racial demographic in the country, with many in major leadership roles (especially in tech).
I’m not saying that therefore caste quotas are wrong. Just that it may have created a sort of “brain drain” in India, to the benefit of the US. Then again who knows; I won’t pretend to have researched this stuff thoroughly.
This is true. Although it’s not just Brahmins, it’s the other upper castes who emigrated as well. And also, sadly why discrimination laws in CA are now having to include ‘prohibition of discrimination on the basis of caste’ in their laws.
https://calmatters.org/politics/2023/06/caste-discrimination-california/#:~:text=Senate%20Bill%20403%20would%20add,a%20high%20or%20low%20position.
Can someone kindly expand on this statement please? I am unclear.
“Then has the turn in the past half-century towards defining college as primarily an engine of social justice and economic mobility, advanced by politicians antagonistic to the labor movement that had traditionally served those ends, not fundamentally been a bargain with the devil for higher education?”
When college stopped being about instilling civic values, cultivating virtue, educating for education's sake, and developing more fully-realized human beings, and instead became assumed to be a tool for a) personal economic advancement and b) social justice, it wrote a big check it could never cash.
Thank you. 🌳
I obviously didn't attend an elite college because I had no idea who Glaucon was until today.
I didn't learn about Glaucon in school, which may be why I always confuse Glaucon with Glycon the snake-god (which is a hilarious story in and of itself).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycon
I know how you feel. I myself always confuse him with an annual gathering of doctors who treat patients with vision loss due to optic nerve damage.
I was thinking Gaston, from Beauty and the Beast
Glaucoma patient here
I studied most of Plato's dialogues at a state school. Turns out you can get a hell of an education at a state school, but not elite access.
I feel like having a racially diverse elite is worthwhile because these institutions involve choosing who is in the aristocracy that ends up with power and people aren't really willing to do the much harder job of fixing the pipeline, or however you would end credentialism.
So instead we just fix it post hoc by allowing a few minorities into elite colleges who go on to be black politicians, business leaders and judges etc and we don't worry about the masses because people won't stand for the much bigger root and branch project that is.
Look at the money that votech schools get in the US compared to Germany or Japan. Now compare that to the money spend on four year universities.
Do you really think that a rainbow coalition of minorities who went to a four year university--and not a vocational college for AC repair--is going to change that?
Votech actually gets a lot of money. The problem is that votech is insanely expensive.
A lot of money compared to what? The federal government spends a huge amount of money on four year programs and a relative pittance on votech.
It's not a pittance. Although I do think we should have vocational training centers. And the federal government funds loans. I think in terms of actual grants votech does pretty well with the Perkins funding. Not sure the comparison. I'm just saying it's nonsense to say we don't spend much. We spend a lot. There's not kids sitting around saying I can't get training.
It's a pittance compared to the amount of spending on four year programs which is symptomatic of a wider devaluation of blue collar jobs. That is why kids poo poo blue collar work even as a significant minority of college graduates toil away in restaurants and retail sales.
Yeah, that's just flat out ignorant. Read something now and again.
The point of elite education is to signal that one is willing to do whatever to takes to please authority.
I have more elite education that most cats, and most everything I know worth knowing I either learned from Mama or taught myself.
Kind of related, from Iowahawk on Twitter: "If you get in 'A' in speaking Truth to Power, you failed."
Hot damn, that’s good
Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote in The New Yorker about how we don't hear from Asian Americans on this topic, even though they're supposed to be the plaintiffs. That's not exactly true, though. We do hear a lot from a certain type of Asian American: the one who has received his or her elite education and is now fighting tooth and nail to protect the good reputations of Harvard Inc. & Co. This is the standard-issue Asian American voice in the media, academia, non-profit world, etc.
Nothing exposes the sheer social-clubbiness value of not only elite education, but also the elite progressive definition of diversity (i.e. a diversity's that's focused exclusively on racial diversity in the upper—and upper-aspiring—classes) than this fact. We're supposed to accept this definition of diversity as an unassailable social good, but who benefits the most and who pays the most? Among Asian Americans, those who benefit the most are those who get into these schools and have their elite statuses protected by the shield of racial progress. Furthermore, this model of diversity results in an intense intra-racial social competition to be one of the few select elite representatives of your group, to escape the Chinatown Social Ghetto, figuratively speaking. If you're an Asian American with a Harvard degree, you are among these winners, and for your continued social and professional benefit, you're demanding that even a working-class Asian American with absolutely no connections or wealth, and who only has a raggedly old SAT practice test book as a social ladder, to sacrifice themselves for you. And YOU get to be hailed as the enlightened champion of racial progress?
It's absolute bullshit. I wrote about it more here: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/dont-trust-an-asian-american-who
PS If you ever read novels about the modern undergraduate college experience, it's obvious that the value of an elite college is for the socially ambitious American non-elite to climb their way into the elite (I also wrote about it in my Substack). That's what it all comes down to, whether people will admit it or not. The hyper-exclusive nature of these schools plainly admits what their purpose is, but so many people, especially elite progressives, try so hard to protect their own self-image by denying that. This shouldn't be a left vs. right issue. Ultimately, it's about whether or not you can stomach such blatant self-serving hypocrisy.
I mean, that's a far broader dynamic, right? It's a rite of passage now for people who have excelled in meritocracy to disdain it as soon as they're done with securing their place.
A few weeks ago, you posted something about how empty it was for the publishing industry to praise novels that supposedly ruthlessly criticized the publishing industry. Same principle there, right? Books like Yellowface and The Other Black Girl, both of which were lavished with acclaim by the very industries they were supposed to eviscerate! When that happens, you've probably failed as an incisive critic. Nobody should enjoy being genuinely criticized. Certainly not the thin-skinned publishing/media field. I plan on writing about those novels later.
Kind of like how people with obviously high IQs loudly denounce the existence of IQs. Is it possible they recognize that their advantages are unearned and feel guilty about it? Fascinating dynamic
I'm trying to square the Asian critique of these institutions with their roles as gatekeepers to aristocracy and I'm not sure I find it easy to understand. Like doing well in high school is supposed to get you the advanced inside track on all positions of power without any limiting principles at all? We should just blindly hand over the cabinet, judiciary, finance and tech to people based solely on how well they did in high school?
No, we should create really democratic institutions and enforce a social stigma against people who choose to go to anti-democratic "elite" institutions instead.
But there's no interest in those kinds of things. I'm literally in the process of begging my friends and family for pencils and crayons and granola bars so when inevitably some of my students can't afford school supplies and snacks I can help them.
People don't want to change things, even little tiny amounts of money things so that everyone has a fair chance to do equally well at school but you think they're going to do large transformative shifts in a time frame fast enough for the next graduating class of seniors?
Your school doesn't give low income kids snacks?
And school supplies are overrated.
I agree with much of your argument, just being snickety.
What would most likely happen if (let’s pretend) we could abolish elite private schools and make college more “democratic” is that we end up with something like the French system, which is “public” but no less elitist, because the admissions process is so rigorous, it ends up creating a similar meritocratic elite in the civil service, the professions, etc. I’m genuinely curious what a more democratic system ends up looking like. It’s not just about admissions: you could let everyone into Cornell or Yale, and most would flunk out. Is that an efficient use of resources? This isn’t discussed very often, but 2nd-tier state schools are pretty democratic in that they accept almost anyone, and then have 6-year drop out rates of like 40%.
The Canadian public university system has its faults, but isn't elitist in the same way as the American college system. While there are some minor differences in terms of particularly competitive programs or more pretentious students, and some schools are known to be more rigorous than others, the undergraduate experience is more or less the same. Acceptance rates range around 40-60%. With some exceptions, admissions are based solely on your grades. I got admitted to 6 out of the 7 schools I applied to, but probably wouldn't have made the cut for the Ivies. The 7 year graduation rate ranges pretty widely, though -- between 40-90%, depending on the school.
I graduated from the University of Toronto, which is one of the "fancier" schools in the country (or at least one that has a high opinion of itself), but it also has an undergraduate population of 43,000. A friend of mine who later went to Harvard Law said that from what he heard from his classmates, Ivies are much harder to get into than U of T, but much easier to do well once you're there.
In terms of the effect this has on our elite class, only one out of our four federal party leaders went to a fancy school. Provincially, our Premier dropped out of community college after two months. While our largest city was governed by a business scion of the Laurentian Elite for far too long, our brand new mayor graduated with an art degree from an agricultural school, and it was never an issue. The school that is the biggest producer of journalists was, 30 years ago, a community college.
Some schools are better than others in certain fields, which leads to better connections with students or profs, placement opportunities, or recruitment opportunities. But ultimately nobody gives a shit where you went to school once you're done.
I gather that UofT doesn’t release public diversity statistics, but what would you say the approximate racial breakdown was when you attended? I see 2021 figures from McGill that the combined white and East/South Asian enrollment is over 86%. I think this is relevant because in a thread where we’re talking about more “democratic” universities, many people are going to assume that’s also a proxy for “racially diverse.”
My experience of it a decade ago was my classmates were predominantly white, East Asian, and South Asian. But Toronto itself is 75-80% white and East/South Asian, and a third of U of T's undergraduate population are international students (with about 2/3rds of those coming from China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). The downtown campus is also different, demographically, than the Mississauga (more Asian) and Scarborough (more Black) campuses. The racial demographics also varied pretty widely depending on your major.
But I don't think a university system that is more "democratic" is necessarily a proxy for more racially diverse or vice versa.
I don't want these institutions to be such influential gatekeepers, period. I don't want so many SCOTUS justices to be from Yale Law, so many journalists to be from Columbia, so many screenwriters to be Harvard Lampoon alums, so many Wall St. bankers to be from Penn, etc.
But if the argument is that these elite schools should indeed be such gatekeepers (and as far as I know, only a radical few are advocating for dissolving the power of elite colleges), then how is it more defensible to rely on some adcoms' nebulous ideologies of a justly diverse society than more standardized measures that are more transparent and accessible?
Elite colleges should either be aristocratic finishing schools or merit-based brain factories. The problem is that today's conscientious elite wants to have it both ways: they want the preserve the clubbiness of the elite college, but also the moral capital of merit. So they simply redefine merit to be whatever an ideologically aligned Harvard adcom wants and if you question that, then you're a racist.
I think the Kendiist intutition is a more correct one here where everyone in life will do fine in basic quality of life terms but we're only talking about the chance to enter the nobility than the grades and SAT rat race. The composition of Harvard should do as much as possible to simultaneously be excellent and composed as close as possible to America. There's 5-10 institutions which are just very unusual in that nearly everyone who applies deserves to be there and can't because their job isn't educational it's to pick an aristocracy.
I think the merit based one is more fit for tier 1 state schools which are about admission to the affluent. Tier 1 state schools are where we get the vast majority of our upper middle class and that ought be more of an educationally focused one. I think top % type plans and some sort of objective criteria make a lot of sense here is there just isn't that much of a floor and even those pushed out can do very well.
Okay, if the composition of elite colleges should reflect America's population, why just stop at race? How many of the black American population is working-class? How many of them are religious? Shouldn't Harvard's student body not only be X% black, but also within that black student body, X% should also be from lower-income families, from religious backgrounds, etc. to most accurately reflect the black American demographic?
I suspect there won't be much enthusiasm for this among many of the elite progressive defenders of Harvard's race-conscious admissions. There was a recent Atlantic piece that said class-based affirmative action was insufficient because the black middle-class would be unfairly left out.
That gets at the heart of what this is really about: an intra-elite partitioning of power and influence that uses the real problems suffered by poor minorities, especially poor black people, so that their supposed elite representatives can even things up a bit with their elite peers.
So if the critical principle is to be "composed as close as possible to America," then let's fully go all the way and introduce other key demographic aspects like class, religion, and political beliefs within a racial group too.
I mean that’s actually probably slightly closer to my view than what Harvard is doing.
Something like 50% of Silicon Valley tech workers are Asian, far outstripping their share of the general population.
Given the influence and prestige of that field would you also argue that it should look like the country at large? If so what's the solution other than firing a bunch of Asians and trying to recruit more blacks, Hispanics--and whites?
As I mentioned the other time you brought up this state, Asians aren't overrepresented in the high status tech work jobs in the Bay Area. They do a lot of the slog H1B worik. And if lots of blacks and Hispanics had tech degrees, then there would be far more pressure for the industry to look like the country at large and yes, it would mean hiring fewer Asians, particularly H1Bs.
Since colleges are probably going to drop standards altogether and pressure professors to pass students no matter what, who knows? There might be more blacks and Hispanics with tech degrees.
There's no such thing as "slog" H1B work. I have known two guys who worked for themselves and charged $400 an hour. One was a Hadoop specialist who worked for Walmart. The other was an Indian guy who worked with Oracle.
There's a reason Asians earn more than every other racial classification in the country, including whites, and it's largely tied to higher than average numbers of college grads in high paying fields like tech.
"Since colleges are probably going to drop standards altogether and pressure professors to pass students no matter what, who knows? There might be more blacks and Hispanics with tech degrees."
A degree is no guarantee of ability to actually do the job. Maybe back before the Fed jacked up interest rates companies would be more willing to hire useless appendages but those days are gone now.
The colleges that *actually* end up “looking like America” are the service academies like West Point and Annapolis, where each state sends X number of students. I’ve yet to see anyone propose this for the Ivies.
I like this idea
Chris I definitely agree with your critiques of the Ivies (and since you are an Ivy graduate) admire your willingness to bite the hand that fed you. But... how much of the gatekeeping role is on the Ivies? I mean- no one is holding a gun to Wall Street and the top consulting companies and forcing them to recruit almost exclusively from the Ivies, Hollywood doesn’t have to hire ONLY from the Harvard Lampoon, and the president can pick whoever he or she wants to be on the Supreme Court. Downstream institutions have the power to break this stranglehold- they just have to use it.
What incentive do they have? Of course these institutions want to keep recruiting people that are just like them despite surface protests about diversity. Why wouldn't they?
In the case of Wall Street, to make more money? My go to example was after Samsung started aggressively competing with Apple in the smartphone market and pretty much all of Wall Street decided that Apple was doomed and it was just a matter of time. There were three prominent public commentators who publicly disagreed - John Gruber (graduate of Drexel University), Ben Thompson (graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison) and Horace Dediu - graduate of some college in Finland (he’s Finnish). None of them ever would have been hired by Wall Street due to their academic pedigrees, but if Wall Street had had them or people like them they perhaps wouldn’t have missed the Apple call and made more money. Yeah yeah, I know, principal agent problem, but Wall Street at least is supposedly super rapacious right? <arms up emoji>
If I work at a large Wall Street bank why do I care about how much money the bank makes on a macro scale as long as it's enough to prevent layoffs?
On the other hand if I hire a bunch of people from the same club my individual status in that club rises. Plus my membership in the club has twisted my thinking so I believe that only other people in the club are capable of original or innovative thinking.
"But... how much of the gatekeeping role is on the Ivies? I mean- no one is holding a gun to Wall Street and the top consulting companies and forcing them to recruit almost exclusively from the Ivies, Hollywood doesn’t have to hire ONLY from the Harvard Lampoon, and the president can pick whoever he or she wants to be on the Supreme Court. "
These institutions want employees that seek to please authority and have a demonstrated ability to do so. In the case of the Supreme Court, that's pretty much the main qualification for the job.
Not only that, but these institutions have the budgets and cultural cachet to be able to pick and choose.
Why not? There is every indication that high IQ individuals have already sorted themselves out by the time they get to high school.
But the population of boys who aren't slacker morons in high school is huge in a country of 330 million people. That may be too bad for those specific individuals but at the societal level it's probably not going to be a problem.
They aren't in fact morons. They are very bright and don't care about grades. And at a societal level, that already is a problem as we reward grinds and swots over actual intelligence.
If they don't care about grades why should they care about solving traffic jams or more efficient power plants or any of the other problems society faces?
I think college as job training is a terrible idea in terms of fostering income inequality. But the idea that "creativity" can be taught instead of arising organically is completely suspect.
Yes there is. The lowest scoring Harvard applicants basically fit this profile already. We’re talking about the difference between should this person be very successful in life or should this person be very successful in life with a path to really stratospheric power or not between people who will all be able to do the work.
But should one or two b’s in life be fully disqualifying for a person whose parents were maybe more libertarian with their child’s leisure time or should it only be tiger moms and traditional elites.
The alternative is to turn away better qualified candidates in favor of the lesser qualified. What's the point of trying to gauge academic achievement in the first place if the results are going to be discarded?
The test isn't perfect but the alternatives are worse in the sense that they are easily abused and manipulated.
Because Harvard and a small number of elite universities are about status and only status. They’re not about being 2 percent smarter they’re about being gatekeepers to the nobility. George W. Bush was fine to go to Yale and Harvard business school because he was there to learn to be in charge not to discover new things no one has ever discovered.
So isn't implementing a more impartial standard--like test scores--actually a move to dismantle that system?
Forcing Harvard to take the offspring of a waiter at a Chinese restaurant who scored 1600 on their SAT's doesn't provide racial diversity but it does inject somebody into the system who didn't grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth.
Not surprising. House slaves are more invested in the system than the field hands.
I know this is not the point of your analogy but I was just visiting the Whitney Plantation and they discussed how house slave life was very bad in a different way. Those people had to live right next to the big house, so slavers had access to them all hours of the day. They endured more sexual assault from the master’s family and guests. They were less able to socialize freely in the evenings.
I feel like the better analogy would be the slave driver? They got special privileges more often in return for being the overseer’s right hand man.
Interesting point.
Razib Khan (who comments here sometimes) has some good and funny comments on this particular dynamic: https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1675556198219755520
The basic claim is that Asian-American profs and others in the elite academic / activist / nonprofit complex are much more assimilated into white liberal culture than Asian critics of the meritocratic system.
To be fair, it's a really perplexing question. Who's more assimilated and white-adjacent?
(1) The Harvard-educated Asian American who works in a white-dominated culture-class field (like academia, media, entertainment, etc.), has a white spouse, lives in Brooklyn Heights and/or Newport Beach, loves Succession, and has a subscription to The New Yorker?
Or
(2) The Asian American who lives in all-Asian enclave in working-class neighborhood or wealthy suburbs, is married to another Asian and mostly has Asian social circle, doesn't even know what NPR stands for, and watches mostly Asian entertainment or "normie" American media that never gets any coverage in NY Mag?
And would people not wonder, if the word were "white" instead of "asian", if (2) were not just a tad, er, racist?
2) doesn't even make sense if you replace "asian" with "white" because whites are, by definition, white adjacent.
"If you're an Asian American with a Harvard degree, you are among these winners, and for your continued social and professional benefit, you're demanding that even a working-class Asian American with absolutely no connections or wealth, and who only has a raggedly old SAT practice test book as a social ladder, to sacrifice themselves for you. And YOU get to be hailed as the enlightened champion of racial progress?"
Now do the admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School, where the furious Asians suing the school district are mad because a race neutral policy dropped Asian admission from 76 to 50 percent--but a *lot* more poor Asians.
How is it race neutral if test scores are devalued in favor of other criteria?
They're not supposed to consider race, so why do you care if they devalue test scores in favor of taking the top kids from each school? Race is irrelevant.
Because the top 5% from school A could easily be the top 20-25% in school B.
"[I]t's obvious that the value of an elite college is for the socially ambitious American non-elite to climb their way into the elite...whether people will admit it or not."
Do many people dispute this? I feel like this is a widely accepted view. It's not a bad thing. There are, of course, many other ladders in American society available to talented people, but no one should be upset that this particular ladder also exists.
Now we need a dialogue between Gorgias and Socrates on the rise of Trumpism.
Gee whiz. I was thinking of weather or not we should pay college athletes
Perhaps trivial, but I wonder whether white elites are really uncomfortable in all-white spaces. I feel like, subjectively, no, they are fine in all white spaces. Rather, they are uncomfortable in that other white elites will attack them for being “racist” if they don’t have some tokens around. So much white drama pretending to be social justice.
White elites are totally comfortable in all-white spaces. They live and work in all white spaces with carefully curated and selected non-whites.
Before you blame them, remember that (as Chris points out above) Asians in America live in comparative cocoons, far more homogenous than elite whites. But then, so do most blacks and most Hispanics.
I can identify only two groups that are accustomed to life where they aren't the majority. The first group is the carefully curated and selected non-white elites, as well as the occasional Asian living in Iowa, or the rich black kid living in Saratoga. But these people don't learn to live in diversity. They live in white folk world, because that's the world they are planted in.
The only group of folks who are genuinely used to real diversity is mostly white, although some blacks can end up here as well. These are people who are middle class, not rich enough to enclave with whites and not enough middle class whites to enclave themselves because they live in high immigration areas. They live in areas where the Asians and Hispanics are split into their nationalities for test scores. They know all about diversity, and think liberal whites yammering about diversity are about as clueless as conservative whites and Asians bitching about Asian discrimination, and think everyone should shut up if they live in a town or their kids attend school where any race is above 50%.
Ask me how I know.
The problem with the test at Harvard was that it mysteriously rated Asians as deficient in characteristics like "courage", "likeability", etc.
How does that not draw directly from cultural tropes that cast Asians as robotic drones? How is that not racist?
What the middle class believes in is one standard for everyone. Polling has shown large majorities of the public that are opposed to affirmative action.
You clearly didn't read what I wrote, or don't know how to click "reply" on the correct comment.
You're the one claiming that Asian discrimination is somehow not real. How then to account for the Harvard personality score?
Ah, so you didn't read. Go find someone to play with in your kiddie pool.
If you don't have a point that you can defend just say so and slink off.
I think most of the negative reactions from the progressive social justice crowd about this ruling come down to: oh look, another ruling we don't like from the big, bad conservative Supreme Court.
For the record, I generally don't agree with conservatives, but I think they got this one (AA) correct.
Furthermore, I think that if HRC hadn't insulted the entire white working class, then perhaps the court would look a lot different today.
Aw come on, that's unfair. She only called *half* of his supporters deplorable. That's only like 30 million people, not 60!
Getting way off topic, but if HRC had acted just a little less entitled, treated the 2016 election a little less like her personal coronation, maybe even bothered to campaign in WI, MI and PA, she'd have won in 2016.
Then again, HRC has a powerful anticharisma, as she is not good at disguising her obvious disdain for ordinary people, so maybe she was wise to stay in Calinfor-I-A and yukk it up with the donors.
Great argument, my summation, the Liberal loves a placebo. Affirmative action may have began as something important but in these last decades it has been a sugar pill. The Liberal loves a sugar pill. For instance: we are bringing democracy and freedom to the Ukraine. Tastes good! It’s fashionable: the shitlib’s virtue affectation.
Primarily leftism is lazy. It once was something, but now it is a parody. That beast that slouches towards Bethlehem, in Yates’ poem The Second Coming, to my surprise, is liberalism. I honestly didn’t see that coming.