Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

Sorry, but this is patently absurd. African-Americans have faced (and continue to face) an order of magnitude more difficulty and lack of opportunity than Asian-Americans. The statistics of a dating app or the number of Oscar winners are in no way comparable to centuries of slavery and legal discrimination.

This just tells me that you have zero conception of what life is like for lower class black Americans. Your assumption is that everyone starts at the same starting place, and that these things (education, employment, etc.) are just things one intuitively knows about and can easily gain access to, if you just work hard enough.

The reality is that for many lower class Americans, there is no cultural capital or mechanism for even beginning to understand the process of academic achievement, applying to colleges, getting a professional job, and so on. There are no role models, no family members to offer support, no community that values such things. These cultural patterns, behaviors and built-up knowledge do not exist.

To analyze discrimination on isolated individuals is to entirely miss the point that centuries of slavery and discrimination have destroyed much of this cultural capital, and simply removing the most egregious discriminatory behaviors isn't going to suddenly straighten all that was crooked, especially not in less than a century. And that's assuming that there is no active current discrimination, which is again, blatantly false.

Nigerian and West Indian immigrants, for example, are among the most successful immigrant groups in the country, and among the most well-educated. Their blackness is not an obstacle in securing positions at universities or employment, because blackness is not the obstacle. In almost every university or large employment opportunity, their blackness works actively in their favor. Compare this with Asian immigrants, and you are now getting to the sort of comparison that I'm making.

1. Affirmative action was designed to benefit African-Americans, that is: the descendants of African slaves brought to the US centuries ago. This is a separate cultural group from recent black immigrants from Nigeria, the West Indies, or other African countries.

2. The percentage of immigrant Africans is also tiny in comparison to the descendants of slaves. So using them as an example to disprove the idea that there is discrimination against black people, is again, not really relevant.

In any case, the problems probably arise from the basing of affirmative action decisions on race/skin color and not cultural background. I don't know if this is a really a solvable problem, but blankety stating that "Asian people have it worse than Black people in America" is so blatantly wrong that I have to call you out on it.

To say that "if you take a black man and an Asian man and control for everything but race, the Asian man will be more disadvantaged in pursuing things that matter" is built on the massive assumption that these things are equally accessible and that the groups are equally culturally prepared for them.

Opportunities in life are not items in a grocery store, easily accessible to any person walking in off the street.

Do you think that the children of uneducated nail salon workers who don't speak English have this cultural capital?

No, probably not, but I think it's fair to say that 1) the broad societal stereotypes applied to them are perhaps less damaging than those applied to black Americans and 2) the children of the Asian nail salon workers will be more likely to socially engage with the children of Asian-Americans that do have this cultural capital (and thus be more exposed to it) than the lower class black American children will be to the equivalent (if only because the equivalent is much less common.)

Again, these are all issues which need to be addressed and no discrimination is okay. But the initial claim was specifically placing them into a certain hierarchy, which I am reacting against.

That premise doesn't make sense when speaking about human beings existing in reality. Race doesn't exist in a vacuum—it comes inherently with decades of cultural and historical context.

The premise of his thought experiment is that things are not equally accessible so we must set all things equal except race in order to measure its effect in isolation.

This would be true only if you were able to tell at a glance which black people are descendants of slaves and which are more recent arrivals. Do you claim to have this ability? Do you claim that this ability is widespread enough to be representative?

You can point to problems in black America, and those problems might be inextricably tied to culture and history. But blacks also live in Africa, and some have a very different culture and history than black America.

And some of those Africans immigrate to America, which then means there are blacks here without the cultural and historical context.

Nigerian-Americans, for instance, are the highest-educated in the U.S. ( https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-m... ), surpassing Whites and Asians.

> 8,000 Chinese focused on building the tunnels while another 3,000 laid track ... The Chinese had seen a pay increase from $31 to $35 per month by Spring 1867, but it fell short of the $40 monthly salaries whites were pulling in ... They were also toiling longer hours, often under dangerous conditions, whipped or restrained if they left to seek employment elsewhere. And unlike whites, the Chinese had to foot the bill for their lodging, food, and tools

> When the strike went down ... "They went to their camp and they sat" ... Crocker, meanwhile, took the step of cutting off all food and supplies to the Chinese laborers, hoping that starvation would force them back to work.

> It did.

( https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/150-years-ago-chi... )

I'm not making a comparison between groups. I just think being whipped, restrained, and starved would probably rise above "poor treatment ... which was exceptionally discriminatory" as a description for any reasonable person.

> Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant ... Responding to high unemployment and a nationwide railroad strike, Kearney in 1877 founded the Workingmen’s Party of California ... the party’s anti-Chinese views were rooted in racism and revulsion at the newcomers’ unfamiliar customs.

> "A bloated aristocracy has sent to China ... for a cheap working slave," Kearney proclaimed in 1878. "It rakes the slums of Asia to find the meanest slave on earth - the Chinese coolie - and imports him here to meet the free American in the labor market

> "These cheap slaves fill every place. Their dress is scant and cheap. Their food is rice from China. They hedge twenty in a room, ten by ten. They are whipped curs, abject in docility, mean, contemptible and obedient in all things."

> The Workingmen’s Party quickly became a force in California and national politics, exerting pressure on Congress and President Chester A. Arthur to act.

> In early 1882, Congress overwhelmingly approved the Chinese Exclusion Act

( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/03... )

Apparently some people at that time thought of the Chinese laborers as "cheap working slave", "the meanest slave on earth", who lived "twenty in a room", "are whipped", etc.

This is just historical context. I know other groups had it terribly as well... I'm not making comparisons.

The point is that being an abused lower class worker is not the same thing as being an actual piece of property, which is what black slaves were. This is not even remotely controversial among historians.

The problem with affirmative action policies is that they end up benefiting a small social layer of mostly well-off black people, and that they do almost nothing for the vast majority of black people. But because affirmative action costs almost nothing to implement, it's an easy policy that many people support.

A real policy that addresses poverty is what is needed, not an arbitrary boost for college admissions based on skin color.

Those problems that are more closely bound with culture and history won't be solved by focusing on discrimination/bias/prejudice/profiling (and other racial issues).

The experience of the Chinese was nowhere near that of a poor Irish or Polish worker. That is a blatant rewriting of history.