Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there being m

Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there being more diversity in colleges, a smaller grades gap between ethnicities and many other benefits that affirmative action was meant to accomplish. The argument being that quotas actually don't help with diversity because, in the example of high end colleges like MIT, a huge chunk of quota kids end up dropping out, or changing to non-technical majors, or stay in the bottom 10th percentile of their class. They end up feeling terrible, their classmates (who on average will be 300 SAT points above them) end up not taking them seriously, so instead of this being a positive experience for everybody, it just creates more resentment on both sides. I suppose many people believe that throwing unqualified kids into the meatgrinder is worth it just for the diversity exposure alone, and their sacrifice is for a greater cause. This is not to say that exposing different clusters of society to each other isn't beneficial to overall social cohesion and acceptance. Doing it through quotas, however, doesn't seem to have been proven to be an effective way of accomplishing that goal. Race is an awfully blunt way of looking at these societal clusters. Mashing all the white people together makes no sense. The Italians, the Polish, the Irish were discriminated against heavily early in the century. Russian-Americans make 30% more on average than French-Americans. West Indian blacks make 50% more on average than American blacks. Africans who move to the states for work are about as successful as Asians or Whites, despite supposed heavy racial discrimination. Race includes none of that nuance in it.