"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).
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Best remedy -- watch shows with other minority actors.
I watch Fresh of the Boat and just started watching Quantico, among other shows with non-traditional ethnic leads. And TV is one of the few places in society where its relatively easy to show your support for diversity.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd like to call out your casual mentioning of someone's race being responsible for them going to jail. That's not really what happens - rather that someone breaks the law and goes to jail.
I'm not aware of law-abiding members of any race going to jail (while the article demonstrates that Asians who do everything same as whites or blacks have no chance of getting into Harvard).
> In 2006, the black arrest rate for most crimes was two to nearly three times blacks’ representation in the population. Blacks constituted 39.3% of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3% of all robbery and 34.5% of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4% of all property-crime arrests.
This paragraph is presupposing that the arrest process is fair to assert that blacks deserve their higher prison sentences.
"From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed more than 52% of all murders in America."
and
"The advocates acknowledge such crime data only indirectly: by charging bias on the part of the system’s decision makers. As Obama suggested in the Martin Luther King debate, police, prosecutors and judges treat blacks and whites differently “for the same crime.”
But in fact, cops don’t over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports."
Lol, I believe that cops DEFINITELY over-arrest blacks. After Ferguson and a huge WAVE of black people dying unfairly at the hands of police officers, you can read a lot of articles online where highly educated black men (ivy league) write about how they get pulled over by a cop once every 1-2 weeks for NOTHING (except for being black).
Think about that, once every 1-2 weeks. I've been pulled over 3 times in my life. Twice for speeding, once for a broken tail light.
1. I'm not sure why you bring up Ferguson when the guy was clearly in the wrong. Ie he got killed because he fought the cop for his gun (which went off inside the car) and then charged at him.
Ie someone who jumps out a 10th story window can't blame the oppressive "gravity" for causing their death.
2. That said, I take your point that educated black men may be unfairly targeted for being pulled over. Yet I don't see how someone being pulled over results in their arrest, let alone conviction of a crime which they did not commit.
That's the issue - not that someone gets pulled over every couple of weeks (unpleasant but hardly life-altering) but that huge number of men are in prison for actually committing crime.
1. As all the controversy shows, he wasn't "clearly in the wrong". Neither was Eric Gardner, that guy who got choked out, nor all the other cases, the names of whom I started to forget because the reporting became so common place, i.e. it was happening all the time.
2. So let's say a white person and a black person in a car have the same rate of performing a crime (let's say smoking marijuana, a harmless pastime enjoyed by all races). Let's say that if a cop pulls you over while you are smoking marijuana, then you will be arrested. Well if a cop is twice as likely to pull you over if you are black, then there will be twice as many black arrests. This is a simplistic model and doesn't even factor situations where a black person gets pulled over, and definitely gets forced out of his car, handcuffed, and searched, whereas a white person might be able to cordially get away with a smile and a "Yessir".
Eric Gardner was indeed a completely different case. His death was an unfortunate accident. The cop did not intend to kill him - he was looking for a way to subdue a very large man. I do agree that under normal circumstances it should be treated as manslaughter (ie unintended killing).
2. Your scenario is missing a very important point. I'm not saying that black arrest rates are much higher, hence this proves criminality.
Rather the rates for being convicted for serious crimes (like murder) is off the charts. Likewise victim reports of the race of crime perpetrators matches the conviction stats.
So basically the innocent black guys who just smoked weed in a car and happened to be pulled over because they're black are not going to jail for it (maybe a fine at most).
That's just a misunderstanding over the definition. Racism as a subject of study in the humanities refers to these societal power structures, and it was this definition and usage she was probably cleaving to.
The world would definitely be a better if we didn't recognize labels, but since I kind of hit the trifecta as far as race, gender etc goes, I fit into society just fine. Those who feel marginalised by society for one reason or another can find solidarity and reaffirmation of their identity using these labels, and I can't really deny them that.
It's very hard to believe that this redefinition of the word racism was done innocently. On its face racism is act of distinguishing people by race for favor or disfavor. When it is redefined as it has been in the humanities it leaves a vacuum. There's no longer a word for the concept that racism originally referred to.
It's not taking anything away--both definitions are valid and commonly used. It's just up to the pair of you to realize you're talking past each other. She'd probably have no trouble agreeing that white people can be the target of bigotry just as you'd agree that white people are rarely at the pointy end of broader systemic injustices, at least in this society.
Much as it may be fun, I'd caution against attributing it some kind of conspiracy of sociologists.
In my experience there's one definition used by the general public, and another used by social justice warrior academic types to prove they have a more mindful world view than you. But that's just my experience.
Not that I completely disagree; but the problem with this definition, on a practical level, is that it seems to cause more harm than good. Identity politics have prevented our country from having an actual conversation on race since those of us in the majority are effectively not allowed into the conversation. So if there are two sides of an issue and one side is not allowed in the discussion then there is . . . no discussion.
I may be mincing words, but I've heard the last sentence frequently enough that I have to respond.
What does the ability to change a "label" have to do with anything? Just because you can't change something doesn't mean it isn't relevant. Just because something can be changed doesn't mean it is.
Identity politics unquestionably applied to individuals is indeed dehumanizing. I hope we move towards an opt-in culture, where it's considered bad behavior to attach identities to individuals without them opting in.
The claim of identity politics isn't that we must be seen through those labels, but rather that in present society we _actually are_ always seen through those labels and we should acknowledge it in our language. Only by acknowledging it can we begin to fight it.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree, but that's the claim as I understand it.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
>, 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).
Everyone is a minority in some context was part of my point. In this particular case, by vanity I meant the admission officers, politicians and other people pushing an agenda to help "underrepresented" groups ABC at the expense of XYZ.
But the success of Asians/Indians kind of disproves the narrative that it is all about class. They come with nothing, live in the same poor neighborhoods and are so successful that they are discriminated against to promote diversity on campus.
There's no immensely cruel and systematic oppression of Asians/Indians over centuries. While things are fair for Asians yet, I'm talking specifically about SLAVERY. Then after that Jim Crowe law and other terrible forms of oppression. And then even now, there's incidents like Ferguson, being made readily apparent by our new age of record-anything technology.
So yea, while I started up growing up in the poorest neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, my situation was not the same as my neighbors. My parents had a college education. They had no debt or drug problems, and did not end up incarcerated. I didn't grow up with people thinking I'm dangerous or about to steal something.
Interesting thing is that as our situation improved slowly to upper middle class by the time I graduated high school, my surroundings got less and less black, and more and more white. It's too simplistic for us to judge the poor, when we do not truly understand their situation.
The title may refer asians as a minority. However, while asians definitely aren't a minority in the context of the world, they still are a minority in the context of the united states and Europe. All of that, however, is completely irrelevant of the issue. What is the issue? Vanity? No. The issue is racism.
When a race delivers quantitative metrics that beats other races out of the water, what does it mean? When black people dominate in basketball and athletics does it mean their race is genetically and physically superior to others? When asians dominate academically does it mean asians are genetically more intelligent?
I don't know the answer to these questions. It may be that asians just work harder... but I do know one thing: All races are NOT equal. Political correctness states that although races look different, all races are otherwise equal. Although this idea permeates the cultural reality of the United States, there is no logical universe where this makes sense. If races look different, then the possibility of other metrics being different is a logical induction.
What does this mean? The implications are scary. Historical mistreatment of black people have made this concept a very touchy issue in the united states.
While it is of my personal opinion that asians are academically successful mainly due to hard work, I do believe that the heart of the issue that articles like this discuss is this: We live in a culture where we are taught that all races are equal, this is not the logical reality and subconsciously we all know it. It's what causes the discrimination in the first place and it's what causes defensive comments like this to be posted.
> All races are NOT equal. Political correctness states that although races look different all races are equal.
If we want to be all philosophical about it we'd say that people of all races must be equal under the law or that they are all endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights or something like that.
> If races look different, then the possibility of other metrics being different is a logical induction.
This doesn't follow. It becomes more clear why if you put it in more abstract terms. Take a bunch of balls, half red, half blue. Now assume some half of these balls are heavy (say 10lbs) and some half are light (say 2 lbs). Assume the balls have a bunch of other characteristics this way. Now what you're saying is that if we know a ball is e.g. Red, we can conclude something about the probability that it's e.g. heavy. Clearly that's not the case, why would it be? Unless you just assume a priori that the characteristics are distributed in a way that's correlated with ball color, there's no reason we should think there's an association between color and e.g. weight.
I'm basically saying that if one trait (appearance) can be different than other traits can be different as well.
In the abstract universe I'm referring to, imagine a bunch of balls and cubes. The balls have no sides and the cubes have six. We live in a culture that says this is the only difference between balls and cubes, otherwise balls and cubes are completely equal. This statement is not true, because balls can roll down a hill faster than cubes.
Outside of the world of mathematics words are used to refer to a fuzzy category of traits. If one trait in this category is different from another category then the possibility exists that another trait is also different, inductively speaking.
>This statement is not true, because balls can roll down a hill faster than cubes.
Yeah but that's because ability to roll down is directly caused by the observable geometry. They are just different properties of the same trait. Skin tone or facial structure cannot cause someone to be intelligent. If you flattened the sides of the round balls, they'd be just as slow. But imagine there's some new way to painlessly crush people's faces into different racial-typical shapes and change the color of their skin to some racial-typical tone. Would this cause their intelligence to change? Obviously not. So how is this different than people with different physical characteristics from birth?
Race categorizations are made by humans according to how people look. From wikipedia's definition "Race, as a social construct, is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics." You're saying that these physical characteristics somehow also indicate how people behave (outside of social conditioning). There is really no reason to conclude that.
I think this wiki section on race along with the sources mentioned are useful here.
>There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined.[22][23][24][25][26][27] Nonetheless, some scholars argue that racial categories obviously correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason, there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
> So how is this different than people with different physical characteristics from birth?
That's because skin color and facial features are directly caused by the DNA. They are just different manifestations of the same trait. DNA is also known to correlate with intelligence. Just like flattening round balls will make them slower, picking embryos with gene combinations known to correlate with higher intelligence will cause the resulting humans to have higher intelligence on average. But imagine if genes responsible for genes correlated with higher intelligence occured million times as often among genotypes of white people than among genotypes of black people. Would then picking embryos based on skin color genes instead of intelligence genes themselves produced more (on average) intelligent people? Obviously yes.
I don't really know whether intelligence genes actually occur more often among white people. I just want to point out that if it's so, it's not skin color that causes people to be more or less intelligent. It's their DNA.
>DNA is also known to correlate with intelligence.
But not with race. You can't tell which race someone is by their DNA, because, and here's the key point I think people are missing, race is a social construct based on appearance, not a biological reality.
>picking embryos with gene combinations known to correlate with higher intelligence will cause the resulting humans to have higher intelligence on average. But imagine if genes correlated with higher intelligence occurred million times as often among genotypes of white people than among genotypes of black people. Would then picking embryos based on skin color genes instead of intelligence genes themselves produced more (on average) intelligent people? Obviously yes.
Sure, if you assume from the start that skin color genes are correlated with intelligence genes then it follows that skin color is correlated with intelligence. I'm saying there's no reason to make that assumption to begin with.
DNA obviously correlates with race. What do you think makes the skin color of black-skinned people black? Or are you claiming skin color doesn't correlate with self-identifying as black, or being identified as black by the rest of the society?
> You can't tell which race someone is by their DNA, because (...) race is a social construct based on appearance, not a biological reality.
So is gender. However, the biological reality is that you can tell which gender someone self-identfies with by their DNA correctly at least 99 times out of 100. How hard it is to believe you can do at least as well (success rate >0.99) with race self-identification? As a data point, some people claim they can do it, and would bet their lifes on results.
http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-01/ps_dna
> Sure, if you assume from the start that skin color genes are correlated with intelligence genes then it follows that skin color is correlated with intelligence. I'm saying there's no reason to make that assumption to begin with.
Nobody makes this assumption, though (well, except for the sake of argument). There's no reason to assume the opposite either. Science works by formulating a hypothesis and testing it.
Here's the thing... traits some in collections. Mongoloid or African American are words that describe a collection of physical traits.
Black people will have darker skin AND frizzy hair. Asians have asian eyes AND black hair. This is proof that traits are inherited in collective groups.
You are stating by certain magic these collections of physical traits that describe an asian or a caucasian magically only correlate with other physical traits. So in a sense, for asians: Black hair correlates with asian eyes but these traits can absolutely never ever correlate with anything related to intelligence and behavior.
What is the mechanism in genetics that deliberately demarcates physical traits from behavioral traits? What causes social traits to be totally random while physical traits come correlated with one another? I think it is more logical to conclude that there is no mechanism that does this.
Please note that I am well versed in the theory you present. It is often used as a scientific basis for racial equality. I agree with the intent of the theory but I disagree with it as a practical truth. Life is just unfair. Anyway, the theory does address a valid point but here's why I think it's wrong:
I think searching for genetic markers at the molecular level doesn't yield results because behavioral and physical traits are abstractions on top of DNA.
Imagine two programs, one written in C++, the other in Haskell. Both programs have the same behavior... let's say they both return the derivative of an expression. If you analyze the source code for correlations without completely understanding it (largely the way we analyze DNA today) you will find that the languages are completely uncorrelated. Both are totally different in style, structure and syntax. This occurs even though the surface behavior (finding the derivative of an expression) is exactly identical. This is what I believe is happening with the DNA. You cannot find correlations with race because the correlations only occur at a higher level of abstraction not in the source code.
You can talk about red and blue balls all you want, but what matters is the real world. It's not inconceivable that like there are physical differences between the races, that there can be other differences as well. Refusing to see this isn't reasonable.
No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are different.
They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change.
Also to answer your points directly, they do not at all suggest races are not equal. "Asian" isn't a race, and "Working harder" is a cultural/social quality not a genetic quality. Same with black people dominating basketball, could just as easily be explained with social qualities rather than genetic. Really you have presented weak hypothesises in the form of rhetorical questions.
Otherwise, by your same reasoning: White men people are genetically superior at leading, running companies, space travel, research, etc... Where as the truth, I suspect, lies in the context of their social situation, not their race.
Ah, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'equal'.
But I also think that's probably less of a fact than you think, depending on what you mean by it. There are certainly some people identified as being 'Caucasian' who have darker skin than some people identified as 'African', for instance.
East Africans from/near the Ethiopian plateau, Tibetans and Andean Indians all have large adaptations to living at high altitude. West Eurasians have lactose tolerance persisting into.adulthood. Eskimos/Inuit have altered metabolism of digestion of fats and proteins compared to the rest of the human race. Aboriginal Australians have adaptations to conserve calories by letting their limbs/extremities drop to much lower temperatures than their cores at night. West Africans are more muscular than any other racial/ancestry group with the possible exception of some Polynesians.
That is literally off the top of my head. There's much more in The Ten Thousand Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending. I regret I haven't read it but the reviews were good. If you're interested in this any good human genetics textbook will do.
As a reality check on human diversity just remember the only species with more diversity in size and morphology are dogs.
>Otherwise, by your same reasoning: White men people are genetically superior at leading, running companies, space travel, research, etc... Where as the truth, I suspect, lies in the context of their social situation, not their race.
By my line of reasoning superior skill in leading is a genetic possibility. You suspect the truth lies in the context of the social situation but can you prove it? Can you prove it either way? Without more evidence and from a neutral perspective both situations have roughly equal probability of being true.
My argument is that it is this cultural attitude of equality that makes us point to the social context rather than the genetic context when empirically speaking we don't know either way.
>"Working harder" is a cultural/social quality not a genetic quality. Same with black people dominating basketball, could just as easily be explained with social qualities rather than genetic. Really you have presented weak hypothesises in the form of rhetorical questions.
You really think black people dominating in the olympics and basketball and athletics in general isn't genetic? I can't prove it but this is something that's kind of intuitively obvious.
Here's an example of how genetics can influence how hard an organism works: Compare the busy bee with the sloth. Which one works harder? If genetics can influence how hard animals work, what magic makes it not touch how hard human races work or how intelligent they are? Can you prove it either way?
>They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change.
What makes this "hypotheses" true? You're saying all races magically have genetic strengths and weakness perfectly balanced the same way zergs, terran and protoss are balanced in starcraft? Tell me, what magical hand is enforcing this balance? Blizzard? Keep in mind, genetics is intrinsically linked with social behavior, it is not exclusively tied to just physical traits.
Personally? I do not believe normal human beings can operate under a mental framework that does not explicitly say "all humans are objectively equal". I am fully convinced that the moment they think anything else, it will ultimately to the conclusion that their own race is superior in some respect, and will use it as some form of justification for something horrible later down the line.
I agree with you, that there may be genetic dispositions to things, I don't know what they are, but it seems logical. The problem is such a public notion isn't pragmatic.
Reality or not, humans can't handle it. So we're equal. Maybe you can handle it, I think I can handle it, I think my friends can handle it. I don't think the human race can handle it. We're equal.
Of course. I'm describing the state of the world not proposing a solution. Deluding ourselves into believing in Equality is probably the best possible, although imperfect, solution. I am simply addressing this imperfection and using it to explain why discrimination still occurs in a world that largely finds discrimination abhorrent. After all, this is a forum for intelligent debate.
That being said, posting a topic on genetic or racial superiority tends trigger extreme reactive responses in people. Under normal circumstances I would have been voted down and attacked by multiple negative comments remarking about my character. Nobody would have tried to understand my logical view point and they usually automatically dismiss me as racist.
You'll note that none of that is happening in this thread. A lot of people are quite accepting of this idea or addressing the issue in a friendly way despite the controversial nature.
It is because I had to spend deliberate effort to craft the language and structure of the post to present truths in a way that is self evident and extremely unhostile. So while I believe there is really no need to pull humanity out of this delusion of total racial equality... in a sense this thread is proof that the world can probably handle the truth... you just need to present the view in the right light.
It's about equality of opportunities, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that everyone regardless of race has the same shot at being an NBA player, though not necessarily that at the end of the day there is perfect proportional representation of whites, asians, blacks, etc.
Which is among the reasons it's so terrible to select applicants to higher education based on the race listed on their application form. It's not 'equality of opportunity' if we see people binning an application because someone is Asian, which is something we do see statistically.
I think one of the main reasons for keeping affirmative action deals specifically with the systematic oppression and marginalization of Black people in America (that as Ferguson and other black related police deaths show, is STILL happening now).
I think this article is showing that Asians are tired of unfairly paying the cost of that affirmative action, with college being a zero sum game.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I don't think the US (or it's colonial forebears) forcibly occupying the land occupied by others, or importing others as enslaved laborers -- was _driven_ by racism either, especially at it's origin. It was driven by economic profit, same as usual. Europeans didn't conquer the Americas because they hated Native Americans, they did it because they wanted the land and it's resources. They didn't import slaves, originally, because they hated Africans, they did it because they wanted free labor.
But the pertinent thing about America is how the society was structured based on racism to _manage_ the economic exploitation. It was convenient to those on top to color-code the socio-economic structure. And this was done at an early stage in European settler colonial society in North America (By the 1600s it was fairly solidified).
This is what makes racism the 'original sin' of the U.S.
And it is definitely not at all a constant in historical examples of nations or kingdoms conquering land. There are plenty of examples, especially pre-modern, of the conquered people being fully or mostly integrated into the conquering society on the same basis as the already existing population of the conquererors. Now, especially in pre-modern times, 'the same basis' could mean as impoverished and disenfranchised peasants -- but the same as the impoverished and disenfranchised peasants of the conquering kingdom, state, or nation. Or in other cases, incorporated into an existing society that is somewhat more complex and with opportunities for advancement
(How the Ottoman Empire treated it's conquered populations is super interesting, and certainly not always great, but _very different_ from how we assume this thing works in modern times. The Ottoman Empire was sort of a pre-modern socio-political structure that hung on into the beginnings of modernism).
There has always been conquering in human history, and it's often been brutal. Even in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Although at the same time it's not been _universal_, there are more and less brutal, and more and less expansionist, societies in human history. )
But the very idea of 'race' is a modern phenomenon, as is structuring a stratified society based on race. (And the idea of race developed in the main during a process of structuring societies based on racial stratification, in a way that hadn't genererally existed before).
Your reference to the integration of the conquered reminds me of James C. Scott's studies of the states of Southeast Asia. As he explains it, the limiting factor on the wealth of kings was the number of subjects they had working the land. So when they went to war, it was primarily to capture more people they could enserf. There was actually a regular intergenerational cycle. Grandparents could have been (the equivalent of) serfs, some of their grandchildren might have had some sort of sub-chief of a sub-village position, others might have been conscripted to fight a war to round up more farm labor, while others yet might have run off to the hills to stay out of reach of the state.
I don't think this is true. I think it's a case where the individual is better than the sum of the parts, and that at the individual level there is much better meritocracy than at the organizational level.
One big issue that still exists, though, is that you'll never get protected classes of any sort into upper management if you don't hire them in the first place.
I don't think this is true. I think it's a case where the individual is better than the sum of the parts, and that at the individual level there is much better meritocracy than at the organizational level.
One big issue that still exists, though, is that you'll never get protected classes of any sort into upper management if you don't hire them in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno. I've worked for a string of Indian managers (directors, VPs, CIOs), and if you look at the highest of the high profile companies now (Microsoft, Google, Oracle... but not Apple or Amazon) they all have Indian leadership.
The ratio of coder/manager (grunt/boss) in Tech is better than other industries, albeit, still non-proportional to the workforce percentage. I presume a factor to Tech fairing better is that many of the founders are of asian decent.
As a white in tech, I sometimes sense that I'm being discriminated against by Asian / Asian-American hiring managers. For instance, I've never been offered a position by an Asian, whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non-Asian.
What kind of concerns me is that so many of the big tech companies have disproportionately more Asians, and many Asians cultures are known to be as racist or more racist. Unlike Americans, who are trained from youth to be tolerant and accepting, many immigrants are not.
Unfortunately, even with training, most people will still be biased toward hiring people like themselves.
so... this feels like discrimination, which is understandable.
> whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non-Asian.
... but does this feel like preferential treatment? because that's the logic you are presenting here.
"when i don't get hired, it's because of discrimination. when i do get hired, it's because i'm a good hire, not because someone else was discriminated against to hire me."
this is why these discussions are meaningless. there's no way of knowing why you did or didn't get hired. yet another reason to run your own company.
Certainly a valid point, but I decided against pointing it out, since because of market demands, pretty much anyone with a brain can get a job in tech, currently.
That a particularly skilled and experienced candidate was being rejected so frequently either pointed to an innate bias, more selective criteria, or inflexibility in pay. Maybe all three.
Ad hominem would be discrediting your story because you don't have a brain. I'm just amusedly pointing out that the logical conclusion of your story is simply that you don't have one. Offensiveness doesn't come into the picture.
I have no interest in following those guidelines. A threat only works if the execution of the threat is worse than the thing I'm being coerced into doing.
This is horribly anecdotal, since asian-american managers actually tend to be less likely to hire other asians, out of fear of looking like they are practicing favoritism toward "their own."
And your bias is probably one reason for why they constantly feel so overly self-conscious about that as well
Interesting perspective. I had no idea that this was a concern.
But, I can certainly relate. As someone who is often involved in hiring, I feel a similar pressure. I try very hard to be objective. But, in order to feel comfortable with my decisions, I (hopefully only slightly) err towards over-hiring minorities and women.
Not that this presents much difficulty these days - it's hard enough to find qualified (and interested) candidates, in general.
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).
In South Australia, at least, there are a measure of bonus points provided to students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and rural regions.
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?
> 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.
That should be fixed first, but it's much more complicated. Even if you could fix all systematic issues the poor would still have less access because of poverty, discrimination, and many other forces.
this can be corrected for to some extent by weighting exam scores based on school/region/socioeconomic status. that would be fairer and more transparent than the current system used by elite universities in america.
the ability to develop an "interesting" application is of course strongly influenced by family background and finances...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>* 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?
“We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President
Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored
by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions
officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual
recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who
get in.
Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children
interesting!”
For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad
news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it
happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their
passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to
complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting.[1]
in other words, use unclear and vague criteria to judge admissions that just happen to massively disadvantage asian americans. it's strange that Faust is not condemned for her absurd and racist suggestion that asian american applicants are on average much less "interesting" people.
> College admissions could really do with some sort of objective criteria
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but 20% of those admitted were Asian American, for the class of 2019, in a country where less than 5%, self-identify as Asian-American.[1][2]
I'm not the one to defend Harvard, but an unestablished minority group only has so many opportunities so of course a lot of peoples resumes are going to look the same. That said, this is pretty much just traditional elitism. If your work harder than anyone else you'll still not get recognized because you're not claimed to be smart, cultured, pretty or interesting enough.
> If your work harder than anyone else you'll still not get recognized because you're not claimed to be smart, cultured, pretty or interesting enough.
Err, that's not at all what she said or even implied.
That's the point: they didn't work harder than anyone else applying to Harvard. They can't make decisions based on GPA/ACT/SAT scores, because everyone has the same top scores.
Hypothetically, and probably not that far off: So you have 10,000 applicants for a class of 2,000 and 8,000 of those applicants are valedictorians with extremely high SAT/ACT scores and they've managed to check all the regular boxes (played sports, instruments, etc.). How are you going to cull 6,000 applicants?
That's a rather pithy way to interpret what was said. Here's an alternate interpretation: be different from all the other applicants. If you have the same grades, the same extracurriculars, and the same things to talk about in an essay, you're not going to be different from everyone else and thus won't get in. And that's the nature of being different - you can't quantify it until you see it.
Having gone to a high-percentage Asian high school, I can tell you that traditional Asian parents mostly push their kids to do a limited set of things (high academic scores, orchestra, etc.), which can easily lead to a homogeneous pool of applicants.
Faust is saying that if you want your kid to get into Harvard, you should instead encourage them to do things that set them apart from the thousands of other smart kids applying. Build an airplane, climb a famous mountain, invent something, be a sailor, race sled dogs, etc. Those are the things that make an applicant stand out.
the point is that holistic can be easily used as a cover for race based discrimination and that this is what is happening at harvard and elite universities. when you look at the quantitative disadvantage for asian applicants in terms of SAT/GPA, I think it's clear that homogeneity cannot explain this away. it's also a little absurd that they publicly place so much emphasis on diversity and "interesting" applicants when the actual student body of ivy league colleges is filled with bland wealthy strivers of all races.
the interpretation in your last paragraph is even worse in a way for faust and harvard: only children with the right parental financial resources and support would have been able to "Build an airplane, climb a famous mountain, invent something, be a sailor, race sled dogs" before the age of 18. it is also hard to see why an academic institution cares so much about such things.
The problem is that the SAT isn't a very interesting test, IMO, for college admission. It doesn't test achievement, but is closer to an IQ test. I think its reasonable for top-tier schools to create a cut-off, but once you score above a threshold, I don't think it provides much value.
And as another poster noted -- Asians are still greatly overrepresented at Harvard. Faust really is saying that Whites aren't interesting (Blacks are of about average interest as their numbers match the general population now).
Exactly, those people want to imply asians are ONLY good at tests, but they have no data to back it up. The only thing they can say is: well, you know, there must be something wrong with aisans, ...
The easiest solution: use anonymous review process in college admission.
Admissions offices curate the incoming class. In doing so, they have multiple objectives: maintain a high standard of intellectual ability and engagement, admit a heterogeneous student body so that people are exposed to others who are not like them, and preserve the particular character of the institution (a specific brandy of nerdy at Columbia/Chicago, the hacker ethos at MIT, etc).
An admitted class that's mostly homogeneous (in race, interests, gender, whatever) is just as much of a failure as an admitted class that's stupid.
The purpose of an elite college's admissions office is not to admit the top N students on some metrics, nor is elite college your "just reward" for being in the top N percent of your year on some metrics.
As with tech employment, there is an element of having the specialization an employer wants, an element of "culture fit," and an element of being able to do the song-and-dance that appeases the gatekeepers (the SAT is a lot like a coding interview).
As with dating, it's not "academic performance in, admissions out." The college has a personality too, and it has to like you.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
I've met tonnes of asians who are great at social settings. Just like I've met tonnes who aren't. Just like I've met tonnes of (black|white|hispanic|etcs) ...
I have noticed that asians engineers in particular, in a corporate setting, tend towards "work hard + wait for reward" strategy. Maybe it's the intersection of what draws us to engineering and upbringing that results in this?
I'd be careful about having that mindset. Studies have shown that people conform to their stereotype e.g. Asian females taking a math test performed better when reminded they were Asian and worse when reminded they were female, because the stereotype is that Asians are better at math and females are worse at it (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/1/80.abstract).
I personally feel that few traits are truly immutable, and that a lot of it is really just in your head. People who conform to a belief end up becoming what they think, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Chin up, I don't think it's genetic. This stereotype of being shy, socially awkward losers is beaten into Americans (asian or not) from a very early age. Just look at all of our media. Asians are either totally absent, or complete bottom feeders on the social ladder. I bet that a lot of your personality comes from the environment and expectations you grow up in.
It sucks, but the good thing is that it's never too late to change. There are tons of boss Asians. I was rather popular in high school (and I'm from the deep south, only Asian guy in my class) and college, and often find myself the center of attention in social situations. One of the upper level managers at my company is Asian and he's very social, and he even has an accent! I have plenty of other friends who are very extroverted and confident, and they're asian too.
It's a skill, like any other, and focused hard work will yield improvements.
But, after seeing how (corporate?)USA works, I was able to specifically account for it.
Here's a few things I did that might help you (list specifically geared towards individual contributors):
- made sure I was the one presenting/talking about my work (stand-ups/hackathons/etcs)
- made a list of my daily and weekly contributions that tied to big picture/visibility so I could bring those up during 1:1s. This helps a ton because I am better at "showing-off" with concrete things or in a situation that asks for it rather than just generally.
- made an effort to be a point of contact to external teams/divisions for my group/expertise.
Even now, I do tend towards "head down, work hard, hope for reward" by default. But, having a system helps me keep on track. Even now that I've got my own startup :)
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.
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.
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...
>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.
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-dive...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I had a similar situation at work recently. I've always been a high performer and natural leader. People love talking with me, they trust me with their problems, and I do the best I can to help them out. I lead from behind, and try to guide people forward. I've been a manager of a large team, and was up to be promoted to manage an even larger team. I left instead to start my own company. That company got acquired and I got a new manager. The new manager was terrible, and had no idea what was going on with the team. He regularly skipped 1:1s, and after almost 2 months of not talking with him, I get my review feedback.
He mentioned a lot of really positive qualities (great at technical work), but his one criticism for me was that I could "show more leadership". He failed to expound on that when I asked him for examples. He was so uninvolved with our day to day, he was rarely present. Little did he know, I was the one working behind the scenes keeping his flailing team together. This struck me down pretty hard, it was my first known experience with racism in the American workplace. My confidence shattered, and I started doubting myself. I hope to put this experience behind me soon, but it left some serious doubts for me, and honestly, it made me reconsider my previously ambitious aspirations. After this experience, I started really emphasizing with the experiences of women in the workplace.
It's also entirely possible that, on average, Asian people are more intelligent than other groups. We won't really know for a long time, as discussing such things is taboo.
I'm Asian too. I don't think it's because of raw intelligence. Asians work hard, but in a very confined way, and visible way. For example in high school, you work hard in school to get into a great college, your hard work is visible.
Scientific discovery and technological innovation takes more than hard work, it takes the willingness to be obsessed with specific and sometimes obscure fields and forfeit social prestige and stability. Neither of those things are praised by the Asian culture.
I definitely don't think this is true, and I'm Asian as well. I think the parent has a better hypothesis, it's the higher bar for immigration. I bet the demographics of Asian immigrants is way higher educated than the average American. My dad has a PhD, my mom multiple Bachelors, and pretty much all of their Chinese friends had at least a Bachelors, most likely a Masters of PhD.
I would say it's very possible that genetically, the Asian population in America is smarter than the average American. Combine that with a culture that emphasizes hard work and education and you'll have extraordinary results. But don't think that Asians are more intelligent as a whole. There are plenty of idiots back in China to balance that out.
Exactly, if you put it another way, it's a highly self-selecting group. They are well educated, highly motivated and driven, and are so focused on "making it" whatever that means, they are willing to move to a foreign country that has the promise of being "better".
My wife's parents fit that definition, and interestingly, all her uncles and aunts who came to America are over-performing here in America, and all the ones who stayed are underperforming in Asia.
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