4 ms·

Great point and I'm glad you brought this up. Like I mentioned, America has many gaping wounds which I believe can be traced back to institutional racism. When

Great point and I'm glad you brought this up. Like I mentioned, America has many gaping wounds which I believe can be traced back to institutional racism. When talking about the prevalence of black kids raised under single family homes we have to take into account why these kids may be raised that way. Is it a character flaw of black families? I don't think so. I'm black and familial ties run DEEP in almost every family I know: especially those with Southern roots where most of black America still resides. I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...

themgt 8y ago
This article/issue is about non-white applicants (Asian Americans) who are being discriminated against in the admissions process. And not just at Harvard but other elite schools, med schools, etc. It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups. Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ... Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.
- 40acres 8y ago
  Solid point, I really feel for Asian kids and parents who are being discriminated against. The reason why these discussions usually end up in a discussion of black v. white is because (in my opinion) that "struggle" affects every aspect of American life, whether or not you are aware of it or have any influence. Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.
  - seatdrummer 8y ago
    Many proponents of AA may admit that things are near fair now, but they used to be much worse. so AA this is just reparations for the past injustice. If that is the case then fixing underlying issues would have less of an effect than we would expect. It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing. A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race. Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0] 0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy. It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.
  - sbierwagen 8y ago

themgt 8y ago

This article/issue is about non-white applicants (Asian Americans) who are being discriminated against in the admissions process. And not just at Harvard but other elite schools, med schools, etc. It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups. Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ... Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.

40acres 8y ago
Solid point, I really feel for Asian kids and parents who are being discriminated against. The reason why these discussions usually end up in a discussion of black v. white is because (in my opinion) that "struggle" affects every aspect of American life, whether or not you are aware of it or have any influence. Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.
- seatdrummer 8y ago
  Many proponents of AA may admit that things are near fair now, but they used to be much worse. so AA this is just reparations for the past injustice. If that is the case then fixing underlying issues would have less of an effect than we would expect. It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing. A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race. Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0] 0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Alex3917 8y ago
> Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy. It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.
- sbierwagen 8y ago