12 ms·

The model minority is losing patience

131 points by stared 11y ago

stared 11y ago
See also a longer text on the same problem: "The Myth of American Meritocracy" (2012) http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... (or, as I would summarize it, "why Asians are the new Jews").
bandwitch 11y ago
"Children who rebel may be threatened with being sent to stay with family in China, and they know from relations there that teenagers in America, even Asian ones, get off relatively lightly compared with those in China." This seems quite naive. We all have been children and something like this seems unlikely to work (at least my personal opinion).
- jacalata 11y ago
  Actually, plausible threats that are carried through are usually quite effective. What kind of similar experience are you suggesting everyone else has to compare to this?
nraynaud 11y ago
What's interesting to me too, is that they are also neglected in the discussion about diversity in tech. They are the most over represented minority in tech, and instead of looking into why, and how it happens, can we find a leverage for other minorities, what open them doors but not blacks and hispanics, they are just overlooked. Complaining people just overlook them as: "it's a bunch of white males", but Asians (and Indians I think) might be a key for change this situation.
- NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  You have to fit it into the narrative that's being peddled. Communists have never cared much for truth. They love using jews as shield, but the left is becoming as anti-semitic as national socialists. Especially in this day and age as BDS.
  - bespoke_engnr 11y ago
    I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you explain?
- lazyant 11y ago
  A bit off-topic but on US tv shows is ridiculous how actors (esp. main characters) are usually white or black, little or no Asians and Hispanics. "Friday Night Lights" is about teenagers in Texas (1/3 pop. Hispanic) and they are all white or black (they even had an episode or more about the divide), not a single Hispanic or Asian ever (only one secondary character for a bit). EDIT: Also we laugh now at stereotypes like the token cool/funny black guy in shows form the 90's or so, but now it's about the super aggressive female black lead ("Suits", "Scandal", "How to get away with murder" etc).
  - protomyth 11y ago
    A Native American actor classmate of mine did a lot of tv during the era where Vietnam-based programs (e.g. China Beach) were running as casting directors would hire him for those parts (his hair was short then). I guess that's why you see self-financed stuff. Defiance has a Native American in a lead part, but I am hard pressed to think of anything else. Figure 2% of the population would give you something statistically.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      Longmire has many Native American characters and addresses Native American and reservation issues throughout the series.
  - cousin_it 11y ago
    One of the worst such cases was the movie 21, where the real life MIT Blackjack Team (mostly asian) was portrayed by white actors.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    it's better than it used to be, and is improving. a relative dearth of characters is worlds better than a population of deliberately hateful caricatures and racially venomous dialog. i have white friends who started commenting maybe 10 years ago on how uncomfortable it was for them to watch that kind of shit on tv, because it wasn't just isolated incidents, it was basically a conspiracy to make asian people look absolutely fucking awful on tv/movies. there was some outside pressure but i think society as a whole, including writers in hollywood, just started going "wtf are we doing here?" and is now moving toward neutral characters for asians actors i.e. nothing terrible, nothing amazing. there's an unremarkable asian family sitcom on tv, for example. i think a lot of the young writers probably grew up in a racially diverse group of friends.
- lazyant 11y ago
  A bit off-topic but on US tv shows is ridiculous how actors (esp. main characters) are usually white or black, little or no Asians and Hispanics. "Friday Night Lights" is about teenagers in Texas (1/3 pop. Hispanic) and they are all white or black (they even had an episode or more about the divide), not a single Hispanic or Asian ever (only one secondary character for a bit).
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  I think it's overlooked because for many Asians it simply comes down to parenting. Many people don't want to address the fact that that may be one big difference between certain minorities.
- mildbow 11y ago
  If I had to guess, I would say it's the cultural imperative of the family unit. One of the worst things slavery did, to african americans as a people, is to strip away their cultural meaning of family unit. I think it's on-par with the holocaust in terms of the human cost. Yes, there are a lot of other things, but not having a stable family unit while growing up messes up the next generation, perpetuating the cycle. That is how black people are different from any other ethnic minority in the US. And that's why I think hispanic people(PC term?) will climb the economic ladder before/faster.
  - potatote 11y ago
    Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by "cultural meaning of family unit"? How did slavery take away from the african americans?
    - eli173 11y ago
      Families were often separated through the slave trade. Slaves were expensive, so owners typically wouldn't or couldn't spend more than they needed to, which meant buying husbands but not wives, mothers but not sons, etc.
golemotron 11y ago
I was talking to someone just out of college the other day and she was adamant that reverse racism doesn't exist. To her it isn't racism unless it happens to a group lower in a power ordering. The exact position of groups in that ordering wasn't clear but it was clear that Asians were higher than other groups. Identity politics is a very dehumanizing philosophy. It tells us that we must be seen through a label we can't change: our race, gender, or orientation.
- huac 11y ago
  You have it backwards - just because others see us through a particular, limiting lens, doesn't mean that we are defined in that way. Understanding that these stereotypes exist is in no way dehumanizing.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - golemotron 11y ago
    Maybe you should ask the people referred to in the article.
- cousin_it 11y ago
  Yeah. The ultimate goal of such redefinitions is to imply that some groups' problems are inherently more important, more worth addressing. But that's not true. All suffering is suffering.
  - caseysoftware 11y ago
    It has become the Oppression Special Olympics.
  - memonkey 11y ago
    I don't know. Is going to jail based on your race suffering more or less than not getting into Harvard because of your race? I tend to agree with OP's comment, but one important aspect is left out when talking about things like this: Class.
dudul 11y ago
Wait? Are you saying that affirmative actions are discriminating high performers in favor of lower achievers? Holy shit, I didn't see that one coming. "The higher socioeconomic status of Asian parents provided part of the explanation, but only a small part. Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work." So Asians' higher socioeconomic status only play a small part in their success, but Whites' socioeconomic status is the only explanation for Whites outperforming other races in academia (thus justifying Whites being the target of discrimination via affirmative actions). Boy, don't I love it when liberals try to make up some double-think to reconcile their crooked ideology.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
bsdpython 11y ago
I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. I understand the issue, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese and not much less Indian descendants around the world? In the tech world it is certainly ridiculous. Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  >I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. Technical discrimination and preference heuristics (Racism) is the default function of the mind. That this crosses over from thought to action in the form of policy is a function of our social systems, like everything else. It can't be solved with the wetware we have, it's a feature not a bug. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_...
- vilda 11y ago
  Minority/minor is political term. Women are declared minority even though they outnumbers men. It's related to something recently called victimhood culture[1]. Declaring yourself as minor brings you advantage. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
  - gozo 11y ago
    People are minorities in different settings. Women are a minority in tech, men are a minority in day care. I'm not sure I follow you last two sentances. You think victimhood culture makes you the victim of other peoples advantages?
- jasode 11y ago
  >, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese The 1 billion global number is not relevant because both the titles of the article and the post submission are about "U.S. minority" and not "global minority". The asian population at 4.8% of the USA is mathematically a minority. >Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity. The minority classification isn't about vanity in this case. The article isn't about Asians not represented as masculine leading actors in Western films or paraded as a prized husband-to-be for girls in The Bachelor. It's about admissions to Ivy League schools which has economic consequences. Minorities are complaining about unfairness (real and/or perceived).
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
"Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action" I was surprised by the paragraph before this, when it claimed affirmative action was holding back Asians, when immediately after it listed a whole bunch of less deserving groups that were taking up spaces. At least this line acknowledges it, though I'm not sure fatalistic acceptance of the status quo is much better than ignorance, both seem driven by cognitive dissonance more than logic.
- GBond 11y ago
  There were Asian-American based advocacy groups that disagreed with California Prop 209. Their stance was Affirmative Action would intact a societal change beyond academia in the long term.
notNow 11y ago
Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with. The other day I was watching a video on YT for the Daily Show after Trevor Noah took the helm. While all what I was just concerned about was the possibility that Trevor not to be up to the job and not to be able to fill Jon's shoes, in other words, he might not be funny, esp. since Jon was exceptional in this regard and superbly funny, unfortunately a great deal of comments on the video were about his skin color and ethnicity and whether he was black, bi-racial, mixed-race, coloured ...etc. It's really nauseating and disheartening. Americans need to be de-sensetized about this immediately because their heightened sense of awareness regarding this issue is getting to an extremely ridiculous level. Back to the subject, America could be considered a relatively meritocratic economy compared to others but in general can't be viewed as such in absolute terms. There's a pecking order in businesses and while they love to blabber about diversity and inclusiveness esp in tech companies, this only applies to the lower ranks and if anyone wants to make his way up, they get to deal with the ugly reality and real strata that make up their organizations or the society as a whole.
- protomyth 11y ago
  > Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with. As a popular TV program put it, it's America's original sin. Also, it factors into targeted politics that is in vogue. Separate everyone into groups and target them with specific (and sometimes conflicting) messages. It works, so I wouldn't expect a change.
  - _yosefk 11y ago
    Isn't it everyone's original sin? Which nation did not conquer the land it occupies today from some other nation? Which nation did not have the institution of slavery?
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Forcibly occupying land that is occupied by others is not necessarily driven by racism. Often it is hunger, or something else. Slavery in many locations was not something done to other races, but to other closely-related tribes, long enough ago that no one remembers the difference between those tribes. USA is somewhat unique in that we enslaved people who were easily distinguishable from the rest of us, and also in that after slavery was ended we maintained a system of laws and cultural norms that kept the former slaves and their descendants separate from and disadvantaged to other citizens. That is our sin. It functions so that racist institutions and the habit of racism reinforce each other, and even pull other races such as Native Americans into the Other category. That didn't happen in Mexico or Brazil or many other places in which multiple races had had a problematic history but then learned to coexist, if not on an equal footing then also not on a so aggressively unequal one.
huac 11y ago
A really good point noted in this article, and ignored in the comments, is that of the 'bamboo ceiling.' Yes, there are lots of Asians in tech. But they are generally programmers and rarely in managerial positions.
- sonabinu 11y ago
  agree
- lohengramm 11y ago
  Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country? Surely most managers in China are Chinese. I would not expect to see a completely even ethnic distribution in high positions in any country.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    > Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country? > Surely most managers in China are Chinese oh look, another confused racist who thinks only white people can be real americans. i hadn't seen one of you in a few years, i thought you had all died of old age by now.
    - dang 11y ago
      You've made more than one personal attack in this thread. I'm sure you know that those are not allowed on HN. We ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rsy96 11y ago
  Depends on how one defines Asians. Chinese are rare among the higher ranks in tech, but many corporations have Indians (India is in Asia, right?) as their CEO.
  - deleted 11y ago
logicchains 11y ago
I think the Australian system is fairer, where university entrance is determined almost solely by the results of our SAT equivalent and our final year of high school in a largely automated matter. Universities don't even know the race of applicants (although they do know if the applicant is a member of the underrepresented Aboriginal minority).
- michaelfdeberry 11y ago
  That would only be fairer if everyone has the same level of access to education up to that point. I don't know anything about the Australian school systems, but I know for sure that is not the case in the U.S.
  - mining____ 11y ago
    In South Australia, at least, there are a measure of bonus points provided to students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and rural regions.
  - chongli 11y ago
    Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness? If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal then why not fix that first?
    - theothermkn 11y ago
      > Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness? While the wording of that sounds very logical, (Isn't is stupid to try to get gold out of not-gold?), it's a pseudologic that has historically been used by the likes of Ayn Rand and other right-wing types to justify inaction. Fairness is always "derived from" unfairness. The pie wasn't divided equally? Then the fair thing to do is to unfairly take pie from the people who were rightly given their larger share. It's theirs, right? They were given it. They played by the rules, and now we want to take pie from some and give it to others? Fairness is only possible when one transcends exactly that line of reasoning. > If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal then why not fix that first? The most naive thing about that remark is that it's precluded by your first remark. The second most naive thing about it is that the way in which this inequality of access works, and the ways in which it can be remedied, should embarrass any speaker who asks "...why not fix that...?" Civil liberties? Just fix it. Traumatic and total devastation of an extant cultural support system by colonization? Just fix it. Centuries of ensuing racism, ethnocentrism, and bigotry reinforcing an association--in both the dominant cultural and economic systems and in the minds of the members of an outgroup--between a race or ethnicity and social unfitness and undesirability? Just fix it first. No problem. I'll have it on your desk Tuesday.
ryanlol 11y ago
So uh, why aren't admissions implemented as an algorithm that reviews academic performance? Minor human intervention could be used to prevent mistakes by the algorithm... Or not, humans make mistakes too. But machines don't intentionally discriminate.
- joshAg 11y ago
  Well, two major issues: The first is technical: how does one guarantee that the algorithm is actually fair? And that of course hinges on how one defines 'fair'. Many of the measures that appear objective aren't. There is a growing amount of evidence that the method in which a test is administered can have a statistically significant impact on how different races and sexes perform [1][2]. On top of that, there is evidence that similar biases creep into how teachers grade essays and even math problems [3]. The second is more social science-y: switching to an algorithm doesn't fix the problem that affirmative action attempts to solve, which is that even after correcting for any test bias certain minorities or subgroups will still perform statistically worse than others, not due to inherent differences in intelligence, but due to the cumulative effects of the inequalities of opportunities in society, eg lesser performing schools, less time/energy for parents to help with homework, less money for extracurricular activities, &c. &c. [4]. Yes, socioeconomic status accounts for a large amount of this, but it does not 100% account for it. There are still statistically significant amounts that are due to things like race, sex, or religion. [1]: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s... [2]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat [3]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias_in_math_new_study_finds_teachers_grade_boys_more_generously.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias... [4]: http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- 9872 11y ago
  That would allow too many asians to get in.
internet2pac 11y ago
When you look at the overall percentages of each race in American Universities. Asians are not under represented. What if anything, American born Asians suffer from is universities more than willing to accept mainlanders because mainlanders command higher tuitions. http://news.yahoo.com/us-colleges-seek-better-integration-chinese-students-051346224.html http://news.yahoo.com/us-colleges-seek-better-integration-ch...
skywhopper 11y ago
I'm not sure what to think about this topic, but articles like this don't help me decide, when they do things like: * Dumping data from an advocacy group into a sidebar chart without doing any critical analysis of the data. The ratios of professionals to managers and executives are meaningless without factoring age cohort ratios into the data. * Comparing Asian student admission rates between Ivy League universities to two California public universities, making an implicit assumption that they have comparable candidate pools and an explicit assumption that the only real difference in their admissions policies is that California forbids using race in making admissions decisions. Neither of those assumptions is close to being true. * Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.) About the only sentence in the article I feel I can put any trust in is: "Asian-Americans are a large, diverse group exposed to a range of influences." But that very true statement feels almost out of place in an article that sure frames things as if all Asian-American high schoolers are academic powerhouses who want into the Ivy League at all costs.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  >* Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.) What other metrics are you referring to besides academic performance? The color of the skin? Obviously not. But this sentence implies something else. It admits that asians deliver superior performance in terms of test scores but that there must be some other metric that causes Ivy leagues to dismiss them. I would like to know what that metric is. What is the supposed metric that asians are inferior to other races at that causes their superior test scores to be completely dismissed? Do you know the answer? Can anyone else answer it?
  - wozniacki 11y ago
mcnamaratw 11y ago
This is hurting the country. I want my (white) kid to get in and everything, but it's not right. Education is an investment, and we're not putting it where it will do the most good. We know there are de facto quotas at a lot of otherwise great schools. (Probably not MIT -- yay!) Hopefully the word 'quota' reminds people of the time when Feynman couldn't get into Columbia because he was Jewish.
mwhuang2 11y ago
“There’s something in the upbringing that makes Asians shy," At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  As an asian, I think shyness is also genetic. My parents were pretty lax in terms of discipline. So lax, that I ended up going to a community college after high school and transferring to ucla after i got my act together. This didn't stop me from being shy. Shyness is just a heightened fear response that's triggered during social situations. I think for asians the threshold for this trigger just lower when compared to other races.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    i'm asian and i think this theory is 100% full of shit. you're making excuses for your under-developed social skills. how embarrassing.
    - Gigablah 11y ago
      Speaking of "underdeveloped social skills", there's plenty of ways to disagree without coming off as a belligerent ass.
    - ryaniwamoto 11y ago
      How would you like it if someone said that to you? Do you act this way in real life? Sometimes I think the internet acts as a sort of alternate reality where people can just act like assholes without consequences. On the internet people cowardly hide behind nicknames, but in the real world you're exposing your physical identity to everyone. Things can get really dangerous. -Ryan Iwamoto
  - mildbow 11y ago
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
A similar thing happened--and still happens--to Jews (which is why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize Winners from schools like "City University of New York"). The Economist blames other factors, though. "Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action." The Truth, which is hard to swallow for some people, is well summarized in the book "The Bell Curve." Fact is, in a pure meritocracy, some groups of people ("races") would be represented more than others. And its impossible to face this fact in America without getting shouted down.
- anonforreasons 11y ago
  >and still happens No it doesn't. If anything, Jews now seem to benefit from a bizarre form of affirmative action, particularly at the institutions that once most discriminated against them: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
gaoshan 11y ago
The points I see missing from that very accomplished young man's application to these top schools are the essay(s), any interviews he may have done and any sort of philanthropic or leadership roles he may have been involved in. These are all important, now more so than ever. It is entirely possible that he did not demonstrate, through these other avenues, the desired qualities of a student from the schools he was rejected by. Getting into such schools isn't simply a matter of racking up points by following some formula and quite a few kids do not seem to realize this. When a school has a flood of equally polished test scores and fantastic accomplishments it can result in other criteria playing the deciding role. Perhaps he didn't meet these other criteria? They are not discussed in the article so no way to know. I personally suspect this, much more than mere ethnicity, as I know they matter greatly in the application process at such schools.
- pointeroffact 11y ago
  perhaps michael wang fell short in terms of extracurricular achievements (though this is unlikely given information provided in the article). but this is unlikely to be true of all asian candidates as a group. serious questions need to be asked about the use of subjective and hard to quantify non academic criteria that discriminate against a particular group. the usa is after all quite unique in using non academic achievements for admissions to elite universities...
jstalin 11y ago
Fix the title please. It should probably read "discriminated against," otherwise it appears as though the Asians did the discriminating.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
anonforreasons 11y ago
>Thanks to such pressures and hard work, many Asian-Americans do end up in top universities—but not as many as their high-school performance would seem to merit. Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians’ soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were (see chart). The picture painted by this article of the difficulties (or lack thereof) faced by whites in securing admission to elite private universities like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is in stark contrast to the one painted by Ron Unz three years ago in his thorough analysis of university admissions policies. While Unz did indeed find ample evidence of quotas restricting the admission of Asians, he also found evidence of what appears to be affirmative action favoring Jews: >Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere. Read the rest here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... Despite Unz's piece being nearly three years old, the issue of Jewish over-representation at these elite private universities has gone completely undiscussed in the wider media, even in the context of Asian quotas, and outlets like the Economist continue to point the finger at whites and whites alone. Similar dishonesty is manifest in the discussions of technology's supposed lack of diversity, where it turns out that whites are actually generally underrepresented at major tech companies relative to their proportion of the general population and minorities (non-whites) are therefore by definition collectively overrepresented, despite the continuous rhetoric to the contrary. For example, at LinkedIn, whites make up only 53% of employees, meaning that minorities are in fact overrepresented, largely due to Asians making up a full 38% of its employees despite being only 4% of the general population: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-diversity/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive... Yahoo! is borderline majority-minority, yet it too supposedly lacks diversity: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-diversity/10718789/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-... Asians apparently only count as diverse and minorities sometimes, when acknowledging them as such won't refute a particular anti-white narrative the media is intent on spreading.
rsy96 11y ago
One reason that Asians outperform other racial groups in the United States is overlooked in the article: the difficulty of immigration. Most whites and blacks are born within the US, and Hispanics are either born or move into the US by simply crossing a land border. For Asians to come to the US, they have to cross the Pacific Ocean. In order to do that, they have to be either rich (at least middle class), highly educated, or extremely adventurous and self motivating. The Pacific Ocean filters out many would-be Asian Americans that would have lowered the average of the "modelness" of the group.
- aianus 11y ago
  No idea why you're being downvoted, this is the reason right here. I don't think I've met a single poor Chinese person in Canada. Which makes sense since you can't immigrate here without a degree in a field the government has put on an 'in-demand' list. That or a spouse or family member financially sponsoring you.
- xname 11y ago
  You are talking about things you don't know. Many Asians came to the U.S. simply following their neighbors. Immigrant to developed countries is a cultural thing in many villages. Those people are just average farmers, not rich/middle class, not highly educated, not extremely adventurous or self motivating. For example: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16356755 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1635675...
- dnautics 11y ago
  I'm a fifth generation Asian American and my family came to Hawaii as plantation workers, my father was the first in the family to go to college, and made captain in the US Navy. Ironically in his civilian (government) job his performance reviews can back as "no leadership potential" despite that in his military job he led the team that implemented the first digital inventory for the navy...
  - dikdik 11y ago
    I think the trope of asian culture promoting "shyness" and respect for authority has some bearing on this, but not in the way the article mentioned. While many asians may have these characteristics, it's not that it makes them unfit to lead it is more about the promoting managers looking for the wrong signals. We see similar trends with introverts and women, no? They don't fit the extroverted, authoritative, direct management style that is deemed "successful", but is often not optimal.
nv-vn 11y ago
I find it very ironic that the people who created affirmative action are now realizing how dumb it actually is in practice.

131 points by stared 11y ago

See also a longer text on the same problem: "The Myth of American Meritocracy" (2012) http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... (or, as I would summarize it, "why Asians are the new Jews").

bandwitch 11y ago

"Children who rebel may be threatened with being sent to stay with family in China, and they know from relations there that teenagers in America, even Asian ones, get off relatively lightly compared with those in China." This seems quite naive. We all have been children and something like this seems unlikely to work (at least my personal opinion).

jacalata 11y ago
Actually, plausible threats that are carried through are usually quite effective. What kind of similar experience are you suggesting everyone else has to compare to this?

nraynaud 11y ago

What's interesting to me too, is that they are also neglected in the discussion about diversity in tech. They are the most over represented minority in tech, and instead of looking into why, and how it happens, can we find a leverage for other minorities, what open them doors but not blacks and hispanics, they are just overlooked. Complaining people just overlook them as: "it's a bunch of white males", but Asians (and Indians I think) might be a key for change this situation.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago
You have to fit it into the narrative that's being peddled. Communists have never cared much for truth. They love using jews as shield, but the left is becoming as anti-semitic as national socialists. Especially in this day and age as BDS.
- bespoke_engnr 11y ago
  I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you explain?
lazyant 11y ago
A bit off-topic but on US tv shows is ridiculous how actors (esp. main characters) are usually white or black, little or no Asians and Hispanics. "Friday Night Lights" is about teenagers in Texas (1/3 pop. Hispanic) and they are all white or black (they even had an episode or more about the divide), not a single Hispanic or Asian ever (only one secondary character for a bit). EDIT: Also we laugh now at stereotypes like the token cool/funny black guy in shows form the 90's or so, but now it's about the super aggressive female black lead ("Suits", "Scandal", "How to get away with murder" etc).
- protomyth 11y ago
  A Native American actor classmate of mine did a lot of tv during the era where Vietnam-based programs (e.g. China Beach) were running as casting directors would hire him for those parts (his hair was short then). I guess that's why you see self-financed stuff. Defiance has a Native American in a lead part, but I am hard pressed to think of anything else. Figure 2% of the population would give you something statistically.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    Longmire has many Native American characters and addresses Native American and reservation issues throughout the series.
- cousin_it 11y ago
  One of the worst such cases was the movie 21, where the real life MIT Blackjack Team (mostly asian) was portrayed by white actors.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  it's better than it used to be, and is improving. a relative dearth of characters is worlds better than a population of deliberately hateful caricatures and racially venomous dialog. i have white friends who started commenting maybe 10 years ago on how uncomfortable it was for them to watch that kind of shit on tv, because it wasn't just isolated incidents, it was basically a conspiracy to make asian people look absolutely fucking awful on tv/movies. there was some outside pressure but i think society as a whole, including writers in hollywood, just started going "wtf are we doing here?" and is now moving toward neutral characters for asians actors i.e. nothing terrible, nothing amazing. there's an unremarkable asian family sitcom on tv, for example. i think a lot of the young writers probably grew up in a racially diverse group of friends.
lazyant 11y ago
A bit off-topic but on US tv shows is ridiculous how actors (esp. main characters) are usually white or black, little or no Asians and Hispanics. "Friday Night Lights" is about teenagers in Texas (1/3 pop. Hispanic) and they are all white or black (they even had an episode or more about the divide), not a single Hispanic or Asian ever (only one secondary character for a bit).
atom-morgan 11y ago
I think it's overlooked because for many Asians it simply comes down to parenting. Many people don't want to address the fact that that may be one big difference between certain minorities.
mildbow 11y ago
If I had to guess, I would say it's the cultural imperative of the family unit. One of the worst things slavery did, to african americans as a people, is to strip away their cultural meaning of family unit. I think it's on-par with the holocaust in terms of the human cost. Yes, there are a lot of other things, but not having a stable family unit while growing up messes up the next generation, perpetuating the cycle. That is how black people are different from any other ethnic minority in the US. And that's why I think hispanic people(PC term?) will climb the economic ladder before/faster.
- potatote 11y ago
  Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by "cultural meaning of family unit"? How did slavery take away from the african americans?
  - eli173 11y ago
    Families were often separated through the slave trade. Slaves were expensive, so owners typically wouldn't or couldn't spend more than they needed to, which meant buying husbands but not wives, mothers but not sons, etc.

golemotron 11y ago

I was talking to someone just out of college the other day and she was adamant that reverse racism doesn't exist. To her it isn't racism unless it happens to a group lower in a power ordering. The exact position of groups in that ordering wasn't clear but it was clear that Asians were higher than other groups. Identity politics is a very dehumanizing philosophy. It tells us that we must be seen through a label we can't change: our race, gender, or orientation.

huac 11y ago
You have it backwards - just because others see us through a particular, limiting lens, doesn't mean that we are defined in that way. Understanding that these stereotypes exist is in no way dehumanizing.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- golemotron 11y ago
  Maybe you should ask the people referred to in the article.
cousin_it 11y ago
Yeah. The ultimate goal of such redefinitions is to imply that some groups' problems are inherently more important, more worth addressing. But that's not true. All suffering is suffering.
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  It has become the Oppression Special Olympics.
- memonkey 11y ago
  I don't know. Is going to jail based on your race suffering more or less than not getting into Harvard because of your race? I tend to agree with OP's comment, but one important aspect is left out when talking about things like this: Class.

dudul 11y ago

Wait? Are you saying that affirmative actions are discriminating high performers in favor of lower achievers? Holy shit, I didn't see that one coming. "The higher socioeconomic status of Asian parents provided part of the explanation, but only a small part. Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work." So Asians' higher socioeconomic status only play a small part in their success, but Whites' socioeconomic status is the only explanation for Whites outperforming other races in academia (thus justifying Whites being the target of discrimination via affirmative actions). Boy, don't I love it when liberals try to make up some double-think to reconcile their crooked ideology.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

bsdpython 11y ago

I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. I understand the issue, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese and not much less Indian descendants around the world? In the tech world it is certainly ridiculous. Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
>I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. Technical discrimination and preference heuristics (Racism) is the default function of the mind. That this crosses over from thought to action in the form of policy is a function of our social systems, like everything else. It can't be solved with the wetware we have, it's a feature not a bug. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_...
vilda 11y ago
Minority/minor is political term. Women are declared minority even though they outnumbers men. It's related to something recently called victimhood culture[1]. Declaring yourself as minor brings you advantage. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
- gozo 11y ago
  People are minorities in different settings. Women are a minority in tech, men are a minority in day care. I'm not sure I follow you last two sentances. You think victimhood culture makes you the victim of other peoples advantages?
jasode 11y ago
>, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese The 1 billion global number is not relevant because both the titles of the article and the post submission are about "U.S. minority" and not "global minority". The asian population at 4.8% of the USA is mathematically a minority. >Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity. The minority classification isn't about vanity in this case. The article isn't about Asians not represented as masculine leading actors in Western films or paraded as a prized husband-to-be for girls in The Bachelor. It's about admissions to Ivy League schools which has economic consequences. Minorities are complaining about unfairness (real and/or perceived).

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

"Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action" I was surprised by the paragraph before this, when it claimed affirmative action was holding back Asians, when immediately after it listed a whole bunch of less deserving groups that were taking up spaces. At least this line acknowledges it, though I'm not sure fatalistic acceptance of the status quo is much better than ignorance, both seem driven by cognitive dissonance more than logic.

GBond 11y ago
There were Asian-American based advocacy groups that disagreed with California Prop 209. Their stance was Affirmative Action would intact a societal change beyond academia in the long term.

notNow 11y ago

Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with. The other day I was watching a video on YT for the Daily Show after Trevor Noah took the helm. While all what I was just concerned about was the possibility that Trevor not to be up to the job and not to be able to fill Jon's shoes, in other words, he might not be funny, esp. since Jon was exceptional in this regard and superbly funny, unfortunately a great deal of comments on the video were about his skin color and ethnicity and whether he was black, bi-racial, mixed-race, coloured ...etc. It's really nauseating and disheartening. Americans need to be de-sensetized about this immediately because their heightened sense of awareness regarding this issue is getting to an extremely ridiculous level. Back to the subject, America could be considered a relatively meritocratic economy compared to others but in general can't be viewed as such in absolute terms. There's a pecking order in businesses and while they love to blabber about diversity and inclusiveness esp in tech companies, this only applies to the lower ranks and if anyone wants to make his way up, they get to deal with the ugly reality and real strata that make up their organizations or the society as a whole.

protomyth 11y ago
> Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with. As a popular TV program put it, it's America's original sin. Also, it factors into targeted politics that is in vogue. Separate everyone into groups and target them with specific (and sometimes conflicting) messages. It works, so I wouldn't expect a change.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  Isn't it everyone's original sin? Which nation did not conquer the land it occupies today from some other nation? Which nation did not have the institution of slavery?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Forcibly occupying land that is occupied by others is not necessarily driven by racism. Often it is hunger, or something else. Slavery in many locations was not something done to other races, but to other closely-related tribes, long enough ago that no one remembers the difference between those tribes. USA is somewhat unique in that we enslaved people who were easily distinguishable from the rest of us, and also in that after slavery was ended we maintained a system of laws and cultural norms that kept the former slaves and their descendants separate from and disadvantaged to other citizens. That is our sin. It functions so that racist institutions and the habit of racism reinforce each other, and even pull other races such as Native Americans into the Other category. That didn't happen in Mexico or Brazil or many other places in which multiple races had had a problematic history but then learned to coexist, if not on an equal footing then also not on a so aggressively unequal one.

huac 11y ago

A really good point noted in this article, and ignored in the comments, is that of the 'bamboo ceiling.' Yes, there are lots of Asians in tech. But they are generally programmers and rarely in managerial positions.

sonabinu 11y ago
agree
lohengramm 11y ago
Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country? Surely most managers in China are Chinese. I would not expect to see a completely even ethnic distribution in high positions in any country.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  > Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country? > Surely most managers in China are Chinese oh look, another confused racist who thinks only white people can be real americans. i hadn't seen one of you in a few years, i thought you had all died of old age by now.
  - dang 11y ago
    You've made more than one personal attack in this thread. I'm sure you know that those are not allowed on HN. We ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rsy96 11y ago
Depends on how one defines Asians. Chinese are rare among the higher ranks in tech, but many corporations have Indians (India is in Asia, right?) as their CEO.
- deleted 11y ago

logicchains 11y ago

I think the Australian system is fairer, where university entrance is determined almost solely by the results of our SAT equivalent and our final year of high school in a largely automated matter. Universities don't even know the race of applicants (although they do know if the applicant is a member of the underrepresented Aboriginal minority).

michaelfdeberry 11y ago
That would only be fairer if everyone has the same level of access to education up to that point. I don't know anything about the Australian school systems, but I know for sure that is not the case in the U.S.
- mining____ 11y ago
  In South Australia, at least, there are a measure of bonus points provided to students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and rural regions.
- chongli 11y ago
  Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness? If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal then why not fix that first?
  - theothermkn 11y ago
    > Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness? While the wording of that sounds very logical, (Isn't is stupid to try to get gold out of not-gold?), it's a pseudologic that has historically been used by the likes of Ayn Rand and other right-wing types to justify inaction. Fairness is always "derived from" unfairness. The pie wasn't divided equally? Then the fair thing to do is to unfairly take pie from the people who were rightly given their larger share. It's theirs, right? They were given it. They played by the rules, and now we want to take pie from some and give it to others? Fairness is only possible when one transcends exactly that line of reasoning. > If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal then why not fix that first? The most naive thing about that remark is that it's precluded by your first remark. The second most naive thing about it is that the way in which this inequality of access works, and the ways in which it can be remedied, should embarrass any speaker who asks "...why not fix that...?" Civil liberties? Just fix it. Traumatic and total devastation of an extant cultural support system by colonization? Just fix it. Centuries of ensuing racism, ethnocentrism, and bigotry reinforcing an association--in both the dominant cultural and economic systems and in the minds of the members of an outgroup--between a race or ethnicity and social unfitness and undesirability? Just fix it first. No problem. I'll have it on your desk Tuesday.

ryanlol 11y ago

So uh, why aren't admissions implemented as an algorithm that reviews academic performance? Minor human intervention could be used to prevent mistakes by the algorithm... Or not, humans make mistakes too. But machines don't intentionally discriminate.

joshAg 11y ago
Well, two major issues: The first is technical: how does one guarantee that the algorithm is actually fair? And that of course hinges on how one defines 'fair'. Many of the measures that appear objective aren't. There is a growing amount of evidence that the method in which a test is administered can have a statistically significant impact on how different races and sexes perform [1][2]. On top of that, there is evidence that similar biases creep into how teachers grade essays and even math problems [3]. The second is more social science-y: switching to an algorithm doesn't fix the problem that affirmative action attempts to solve, which is that even after correcting for any test bias certain minorities or subgroups will still perform statistically worse than others, not due to inherent differences in intelligence, but due to the cumulative effects of the inequalities of opportunities in society, eg lesser performing schools, less time/energy for parents to help with homework, less money for extracurricular activities, &c. &c. [4]. Yes, socioeconomic status accounts for a large amount of this, but it does not 100% account for it. There are still statistically significant amounts that are due to things like race, sex, or religion. [1]: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s... [2]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat [3]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias_in_math_new_study_finds_teachers_grade_boys_more_generously.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias... [4]: http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
9872 11y ago
That would allow too many asians to get in.

internet2pac 11y ago

When you look at the overall percentages of each race in American Universities. Asians are not under represented. What if anything, American born Asians suffer from is universities more than willing to accept mainlanders because mainlanders command higher tuitions. http://news.yahoo.com/us-colleges-seek-better-integration-chinese-students-051346224.html http://news.yahoo.com/us-colleges-seek-better-integration-ch...

skywhopper 11y ago

I'm not sure what to think about this topic, but articles like this don't help me decide, when they do things like: * Dumping data from an advocacy group into a sidebar chart without doing any critical analysis of the data. The ratios of professionals to managers and executives are meaningless without factoring age cohort ratios into the data. * Comparing Asian student admission rates between Ivy League universities to two California public universities, making an implicit assumption that they have comparable candidate pools and an explicit assumption that the only real difference in their admissions policies is that California forbids using race in making admissions decisions. Neither of those assumptions is close to being true. * Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.) About the only sentence in the article I feel I can put any trust in is: "Asian-Americans are a large, diverse group exposed to a range of influences." But that very true statement feels almost out of place in an article that sure frames things as if all Asian-American high schoolers are academic powerhouses who want into the Ivy League at all costs.

crimsonalucard 11y ago
>* Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.) What other metrics are you referring to besides academic performance? The color of the skin? Obviously not. But this sentence implies something else. It admits that asians deliver superior performance in terms of test scores but that there must be some other metric that causes Ivy leagues to dismiss them. I would like to know what that metric is. What is the supposed metric that asians are inferior to other races at that causes their superior test scores to be completely dismissed? Do you know the answer? Can anyone else answer it?
- wozniacki 11y ago

mcnamaratw 11y ago

This is hurting the country. I want my (white) kid to get in and everything, but it's not right. Education is an investment, and we're not putting it where it will do the most good. We know there are de facto quotas at a lot of otherwise great schools. (Probably not MIT -- yay!) Hopefully the word 'quota' reminds people of the time when Feynman couldn't get into Columbia because he was Jewish.

mwhuang2 11y ago

“There’s something in the upbringing that makes Asians shy," At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.

crimsonalucard 11y ago
As an asian, I think shyness is also genetic. My parents were pretty lax in terms of discipline. So lax, that I ended up going to a community college after high school and transferring to ucla after i got my act together. This didn't stop me from being shy. Shyness is just a heightened fear response that's triggered during social situations. I think for asians the threshold for this trigger just lower when compared to other races.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  i'm asian and i think this theory is 100% full of shit. you're making excuses for your under-developed social skills. how embarrassing.
  - Gigablah 11y ago
    Speaking of "underdeveloped social skills", there's plenty of ways to disagree without coming off as a belligerent ass.
  - ryaniwamoto 11y ago
    How would you like it if someone said that to you? Do you act this way in real life? Sometimes I think the internet acts as a sort of alternate reality where people can just act like assholes without consequences. On the internet people cowardly hide behind nicknames, but in the real world you're exposing your physical identity to everyone. Things can get really dangerous. -Ryan Iwamoto
- mildbow 11y ago

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

A similar thing happened--and still happens--to Jews (which is why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize Winners from schools like "City University of New York"). The Economist blames other factors, though. "Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action." The Truth, which is hard to swallow for some people, is well summarized in the book "The Bell Curve." Fact is, in a pure meritocracy, some groups of people ("races") would be represented more than others. And its impossible to face this fact in America without getting shouted down.

anonforreasons 11y ago
>and still happens No it doesn't. If anything, Jews now seem to benefit from a bizarre form of affirmative action, particularly at the institutions that once most discriminated against them: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

gaoshan 11y ago

The points I see missing from that very accomplished young man's application to these top schools are the essay(s), any interviews he may have done and any sort of philanthropic or leadership roles he may have been involved in. These are all important, now more so than ever. It is entirely possible that he did not demonstrate, through these other avenues, the desired qualities of a student from the schools he was rejected by. Getting into such schools isn't simply a matter of racking up points by following some formula and quite a few kids do not seem to realize this. When a school has a flood of equally polished test scores and fantastic accomplishments it can result in other criteria playing the deciding role. Perhaps he didn't meet these other criteria? They are not discussed in the article so no way to know. I personally suspect this, much more than mere ethnicity, as I know they matter greatly in the application process at such schools.

pointeroffact 11y ago
perhaps michael wang fell short in terms of extracurricular achievements (though this is unlikely given information provided in the article). but this is unlikely to be true of all asian candidates as a group. serious questions need to be asked about the use of subjective and hard to quantify non academic criteria that discriminate against a particular group. the usa is after all quite unique in using non academic achievements for admissions to elite universities...

jstalin 11y ago

Fix the title please. It should probably read "discriminated against," otherwise it appears as though the Asians did the discriminating.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

anonforreasons 11y ago

>Thanks to such pressures and hard work, many Asian-Americans do end up in top universities—but not as many as their high-school performance would seem to merit. Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians’ soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were (see chart). The picture painted by this article of the difficulties (or lack thereof) faced by whites in securing admission to elite private universities like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is in stark contrast to the one painted by Ron Unz three years ago in his thorough analysis of university admissions policies. While Unz did indeed find ample evidence of quotas restricting the admission of Asians, he also found evidence of what appears to be affirmative action favoring Jews: >Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere. Read the rest here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... Despite Unz's piece being nearly three years old, the issue of Jewish over-representation at these elite private universities has gone completely undiscussed in the wider media, even in the context of Asian quotas, and outlets like the Economist continue to point the finger at whites and whites alone. Similar dishonesty is manifest in the discussions of technology's supposed lack of diversity, where it turns out that whites are actually generally underrepresented at major tech companies relative to their proportion of the general population and minorities (non-whites) are therefore by definition collectively overrepresented, despite the continuous rhetoric to the contrary. For example, at LinkedIn, whites make up only 53% of employees, meaning that minorities are in fact overrepresented, largely due to Asians making up a full 38% of its employees despite being only 4% of the general population: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-diversity/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive... Yahoo! is borderline majority-minority, yet it too supposedly lacks diversity: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-diversity/10718789/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-... Asians apparently only count as diverse and minorities sometimes, when acknowledging them as such won't refute a particular anti-white narrative the media is intent on spreading.

rsy96 11y ago

One reason that Asians outperform other racial groups in the United States is overlooked in the article: the difficulty of immigration. Most whites and blacks are born within the US, and Hispanics are either born or move into the US by simply crossing a land border. For Asians to come to the US, they have to cross the Pacific Ocean. In order to do that, they have to be either rich (at least middle class), highly educated, or extremely adventurous and self motivating. The Pacific Ocean filters out many would-be Asian Americans that would have lowered the average of the "modelness" of the group.

aianus 11y ago
No idea why you're being downvoted, this is the reason right here. I don't think I've met a single poor Chinese person in Canada. Which makes sense since you can't immigrate here without a degree in a field the government has put on an 'in-demand' list. That or a spouse or family member financially sponsoring you.
xname 11y ago
You are talking about things you don't know. Many Asians came to the U.S. simply following their neighbors. Immigrant to developed countries is a cultural thing in many villages. Those people are just average farmers, not rich/middle class, not highly educated, not extremely adventurous or self motivating. For example: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16356755 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1635675...
dnautics 11y ago
I'm a fifth generation Asian American and my family came to Hawaii as plantation workers, my father was the first in the family to go to college, and made captain in the US Navy. Ironically in his civilian (government) job his performance reviews can back as "no leadership potential" despite that in his military job he led the team that implemented the first digital inventory for the navy...
- dikdik 11y ago
  I think the trope of asian culture promoting "shyness" and respect for authority has some bearing on this, but not in the way the article mentioned. While many asians may have these characteristics, it's not that it makes them unfit to lead it is more about the promoting managers looking for the wrong signals. We see similar trends with introverts and women, no? They don't fit the extroverted, authoritative, direct management style that is deemed "successful", but is often not optimal.

nv-vn 11y ago

I find it very ironic that the people who created affirmative action are now realizing how dumb it actually is in practice.