Law Affirmative Action Abolished: U.S Supreme Court Outlaws Racial Discrimination In College Admissions.

Is NYC Mayor de Blasio Anti-Asian?
By Patrick Buchanan | Friday, 08 June 2018

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks onstage at the Edison Ballroom on March 20, 2018, in New York City.


"Though New York City has one of the most segregated schools systems in the country," writes Elizabeth Harris of The New York Times, until now, Mayor Bill de Blasio "was all but silent on the issue."

He was "reluctant even to use the word 'segregation.'"

Now the notion that the liberal mayor belongs in the same basket as Southern governors in the '50s and '60s like Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Ross Barnett of Mississippi seems a bit of a stretch.

For what Harris means by "segregation" is that in the city's eight most prestigious schools, like Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx School of Science, where admission is by written test, the makeup of the student body does not remotely resemble the racial diversity of the city.

"Black and Hispanic students make up nearly 70 percent of the city's public school students," writes Harris, "but they received just 10 percent of offers for seats at specialized schools this fall."

"About 27 percent of the offers went to white students who make up 15 percent of the student system; 52 percent went to Asian students, who up make 16 percent."

Harris later adjusted her numbers. Asians are 62 percent of students. At Stuyvesant, only 10 of 900 students being admitted this fall are black.

At Stuyvesant, The Wall Street Journal writes, "2.8 percent of students are Latino and 0.69 percent are black. But 72.9 percent are Asian-American."

Harris decries this as "extreme school segregation."

De Blasio now demands change: "We must be sure that the very best high schools are open to . . . every kind of New Yorker." The student bodies at the elite public schools "need to look like New York City."

Translation: We must have more Hispanic and black students, and if that means throwing out the entrance exam to cut the numbers of Asians and whites, throw out the exam.

Soo Kim, president of the Stuyvesant alumni association, is having none of it: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but they're saying these schools are too Asian, so there must be something wrong. . . . Am I the only one who looks at that and says, 'I don't understand how that's even legal.'"

Councilman Peter Koo took it straight to the mayor:

"The test is the most unbiased way to get into a school. . . . It doesn't require a resume. It doesn't even require connections. The mayor's son just graduated from Brooklyn Tech and got into Yale. Now he wants to stop this and build a barrier to Asian-Americans — especially our children."

"I'm not sure if the mayor is a racist," says Kenneth Chiu, chairman of the New York City Asian-American Democratic Club, "but this policy is certainly discriminatory."

As Asians demonstrated this week against changing admissions standards to reduce the number of Asian students, schools chancellor Richard Carranza gave them the back of his hand: "I just don't buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to these schools."

Yet it is Carranza and De Blasio who are claiming an entitlement to seats at the schools based on race. The Asian protesters are insisting on maintaining merit and performance, measured by tests, as the standard of admission.

This issue is not confined to New York. It has gone national and pits Asian-Americans who believe in and benefit from a meritocracy in education against egalitarians who embrace race quotas and affirmative action to bring about a greater equality of rewards.

That Asians are the new victims of race discrimination seems undeniable. In August, the Times reported:

"A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called 'the Asian tax.'

"A lawsuit cites Harvard's Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale."

Now, compare the numbers from California:

"In the same year (2013), Asian-Americans made up 34.8 percent of the student body at the University of California, Los Angeles, 32.4 percent at Berkeley and 42.5 percent at Caltech."

Among possible reasons for the racial disparities: In 1996, by voter referendum, Californians outlawed racial preferences.

What the Ivy League is doing may be criminal in the Golden State.

In 1965, in words written by Richard Goodwin who died last month, and delivered at Howard University, LBJ declared:

"This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just . . . equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result."

In today's clash in liberalism's citadel over which races have too many seats at Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant, and which races have too few, we get a glimpse of America's future.

It appears to be a future of endless collisions and conflicts over who deserves and who gets what — based upon ethnicity and race.

https://www.newsmax.com/patrickbuchanan/asian-students-schools-mayor/2018/06/07/id/864908/
 
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^^^ Translation - Let's downgrade the quality of these schools so more black and Latino students can get in.
 
No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan would destroy the best high schools in New York City
By Boaz Weinstein | June 13, 2018

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Protesting Mayor Bill de Blasio's proposal to revamp admissions to New York City’s specialized high schools.


Like many alumni of Stuyvesant, the city’s premier public specialized high school, I believe that admission to the school was one of the seminal events of my life. I came from a public middle school; my father was an insurance broker on Coney Island Avenue and my mother was an immigrant who worked as a translator. On weekends, I walked around Brooklyn placing fliers advertising my father’s business under the windshield wipers of cars.

The facilities and the teachers at Stuyvesant were not materially different from any other New York City public school. I quickly learned that the magic of the place, then as now, was its cohort of incredibly bright kids encouraged by camaraderie and competition to push themselves to succeed. I got to sit next to Omar Jadwat in metal shop, Gary Shteyngart in homeroom, Naval Ravikant in history, and Ruvim Breydo in physics, and that made all the difference.

Admission to Stuyvesant was and remains determined by a single test available to all middle school students in the city. There are no soft criteria for admission: no interviews, no favoritism for legacies, no strings to be pulled. It’s all about whether you do well on the test, which best determines whether or not you can do the academic work.

You would think that Mayor Bill de Blasio would celebrate Stuyvesant as the crown jewel of the city’s school system. Instead, he has announced a plan that will destroy it in all but name.

This month, the mayor said he would seek legislation that would eliminate the test completely. Instead, he’d guarantee automatic admission to Stuyvesant — and the seven other specialized high schools in the city — for the top students at every middle school, regardless of their abilities.

The mayor says he is trying to address what is undoubtedly a heartbreaking problem: the gross underrepresentation of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and schools like it. In 2016 black and Latino students constituted 44 percent of the kids who took the test (and 65 percent of the New York City school population). Yet they make up just 4 percent of Stuyvesant students and 15 percent of students at the specialized high schools overall.

But the mayor’s solution is no solution at all.

For one thing, his plan seems purposely oblivious to his administration’s utter failure to prepare students across the city for the admissions test — and for a school as challenging as Stuyvesant. In nearly one quarter of the city’s public middle schools, zero seventh graders scored at the advanced level on the annual New York State Mathematics Exam in 2017. Mr. de Blasio would send the top 7 percent of students at every middle school to the specialized high schools, but at 80 middle schools — or one out of every six — not even 7 percent of seventh graders passed the state math exam.

These students have been in the mayor’s charge since they were 9 years old. Instead of complaining, as he has, that the admissions test invites so-called gaming in the form of preparing for it after school and during summers, we should be demanding answers from him as to why middle schools themselves are not teaching the basic math and reading skills that are its subject.

The mayor says he is worried about poor students’ lack of access to Stuyvesant. (His interim plan, as a stopgap before he gets the legislative change he wants, is to expand an existing program so that 20 percent of seats will be set aside for low-income students from high-poverty schools who just missed the test’s cutoff score.) But already, according to the Department of Education’s own measure of poverty, 44 percent of Stuyvesant students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch or are eligible for Human Resources Administration benefits. The school is diverse in other ways, too: 36 percent of Stuyvesant students self-report speaking a language other than English at home.

The issue, of course, is sufficient racial diversity. Asians make up 75 percent of Stuyvesant students and 62 percent of specialized high school students overall. Last week Richard Carranza, the mayor’s new schools chancellor, put it this way: “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”

There is so much that is disheartening about that sentence. It pits minority groups in our city against one another. It imagines a cabal. And by describing the majority populations of these schools as “one ethnic group,” it fails to appreciate the socio-economic and other diversity among these students and internal to Asian communities. It’s no surprise that Asian alumni, students and activists have protested that the mayor’s plan is punitive toward them and are angry and demoralized by the way they are being described.

It is hard to talk about why some communities have resorted to self-help in the face of the lousy education their children get in the city’s public schools, where they should be learning the reading and math that the test — and life — requires. (The test is similar to the SAT, which is so critical for college admissions.)

Rather than lead us through that difficult conversation, the chancellor’s response is to build a straw man because no ethnic or racial group could possibly claim entitlement to Stuyvesant. Not even the school’s biggest critics can seriously allege that the admissions test is racially or ethnically biased, or that it calls for special knowledge better known to some groups.

What the protesters stand for — and I stand with them — is the universal principle that talent and hard work should be rewarded. I wish that more children across the city had the opportunities they deserve to demonstrate their talent and hard work. It is worth fighting for this principle — in our public schools perhaps most of all.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opinion/de-blasio-stuyvesant-school.html
 
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Interesting prespective Asians do better at the low stakes testing as well so that can't be a replacement
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/06/new-york-city-has-an-elite-high-school-problem/
Here’s a bit of statistical reckoning for you to ponder today. New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio wants to get more black kids into his city’s specialized high schools, which admit the top 5 percent of all students:

The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools — including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed – it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence….Right now, we are living with monumental injustice. The prestigious high schools make 5,000 admissions offers to incoming ninth-graders. Yet, this year just 172 black students and 298 Latino students received offers. This happened in a city where two out of every three eighth-graders in our public schools are Latino or black.

Bob Somerby has been commenting on this for the past few days, and it got me curious: how many black students should we expect in these high schools in the first place? What if we ditch the results of the high-stakes SHSAT and instead take a look at the results of the low-stakes NAEP test? Here’s the mathematical skinny:

  • For all NYC eighth graders, the average math score on the NAEP is 275 with a standard deviation of 41.
  • The cutoff for the top 5 percent is about 1.6 SDs above the mean, which is a score of 340.
  • For black eighth graders, the average math score is 256 with a standard deviation of 33.
  • A score of 340 is therefore 2.5 SDs above the mean for black kids.
  • New York City has 75,000 eighth graders, of which about 20,000 are black.
  • 2.5 SDs above the mean is 0.6 percent of the total population. That’s about 120 black students.
If anything, New York City is currently admitting more black eighth graders than you’d expect. DeBlasio wants to increase this number by giving preferences to “economically disadvantaged students who just missed the test cut-off,” which will work but won’t significantly increase the numbers unless “just missed” is defined pretty broadly. Even if your goal were a fairly modest increase to 300 black students admitted each year, you’d need to let in kids with a math score of about 325, compared to 340 for everyone else.


That may well be both doable and fair, though it’s likely that these kids are going to need extra help to catch up with their famously competitive peers at New York’s specialized high schools. But if you want to do even more, eighth grade just isn’t going to cut it. It’s too late. The black-white test gap needs to close in primary school so you have a bigger pool of qualified kids to choose from once they get to eighth grade. The problem is that in New York City schools, there’s already a nearly three-grade-level gap between black and white kids by fourth grade:

blog_naep_nyc_math_fourth_grade.gif

Until we figure out how to fix this, there’s barely any chance of making any real progress at the high school level.
 
Interesting prespective Asians do better at the low stakes testing as well so that can't be a replacement/

That gap developes very strongly and very early (according to the article).

It seems pretty obvious that the majority of the work to fix the problem should and will have to be done much earlier.
 
That gap developes very strongly and very early (according to the article).

It seems pretty obvious that the majority of the work to fix the problem should and will have to be done much earlier.
I like this line

That may well be both doable and fair, though it’s likely that these kids are going to need extra help to catch up with their famously competitive peers at New York’s specialized high schools.

Why don't they just come out and say Asian kids. Rather they are famously competitive peers
 
Interesting prespective Asians do better at the low stakes testing as well so that can't be a replacement
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/06/new-york-city-has-an-elite-high-school-problem/

I'm a Korean student that went to Stuyvesant.

One thing I have a huge problem with is this - They keep complaining that the specialized schools are all Asian and white kids - not enough diversity, not enough black and Latino kids.

But within the "Asian" moniker is tremendous diversity; I went to school with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Bukharian, Afghani, Kazakhstani and more students, all of whom are lumped under "Asian."

All of these countries speak different languages, eat different foods, look different and come from all over the globe. Yet they are all one monolithic "Asian" group? WTF is that?

If they counted this diversity instead of grouping them into one group, these specialized schools would the MOST diverse schools in the city.

Another argument is that the students that get in have parents that pay for expensive tutoring. That is true in some cases - however, more than half the students are from POOR families.

Their parents just sacrificed and scrounged to be able to pay for tutoring. They are disadvantaged too.

I didn't even get tutoring. I just bought a Barron's practice test book. Which is like $15-$20 at Barnes & Nobles and ANYONE can buy.

The vast majority of Stuy's students are the children of IMMIGRANT parents. They sacrificed and and gave a shit about their kids education - not complain.

The thing that is different about this test is that it doesn't matter who your parents are, how rich you are, who you know, what recommendations you can get, etc. NONE of that matters.

You pass the test, you get in., You don't pass, you don't get in. I don't know how much fairer you can get.

If you can't pass, you didn't STUDY HARD ENOUGH.

Additionally, you have TWO CHANCES to pass - in 8th and 9th grade. So get a freaking practice test book and study.


The truth is this - the failure to prepare the black and Latino kids happens way before the time to take the test. K-8 education for them SUCKS. In a lot of those predominantly black and Latino schools, they can't even do fractions by 8th grade. How in the hell are they supposed to keep up with the city's brightest students?

And finally - This test is NOT SUPER HARD. And this is not me being cocky. I'm not a genius - at all. I got average grades at Stuy and often below average because I cut class so much.

If you don't have the ability to study and pass this test, you shouldn't get in - period. This is affirmative action gone wrong - for a number of reasons - it takes slots away from much more hard working and deserving students, it won't help the students let in that couldn't pass because they can't keep up, it'll dumb down the school, and diversity doesn't only mean black and Latino students.
 
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I'm a Korean student that went to Stuyvesant.

One thing thing I have a huge problem with is this - They keep complaining that the specialized schools are all Asian and white kids - not enough diversity, not enough black and Latino kids.

But within the "Asian" moniker is tremendous diversity; I went to school with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Bukharian, Afghani, Kazakhstani and more students, all of whom are lumped under "Asian."

All of these countries speak different languages, eat different foods, look different and come from all over the globe. Yet they are all one monolithic "Asian" group? WTF is that?

If they counted this diversity instead of grouping them into one group, these specialized schools would the MOST diverse schools in the city.

Another argument is that the students that get in have parents that pay for expensive tutoring. That is true in some cases - however, more than half the students are from POOR families.

Their parents just sacrificed and scrounged to be able to pay for tutoring. They are disadvantaged too.

I didn't even get tutoring. I just bought a Barron's practice test book. Which is like $15-$20 at Barnes & Nobles and ANYONE can buy.

The vast majority of Stuy's students are the children of IMMIGRANT parents. They sacrificed and and gave a shit about their kids education - not complain.

The thing that is different about this test is that it doesn't matter who your parents are, how rich you are, who you know, what recommendations you can get, etc. NONE of that matters.

You pass the test, you get in., You don't pass, you don't get in. I don't know how much fairer you can get.

If you can't pass, you didn't STUDY HARD ENOUGH.

Additionally, you have TWO CHANCES to pass - in 8th and 9th grade. So get a freaking practice test book and study.


The truth is this - the failure to prepare the black and Latino kids happens way before the time to take the test. K-8 education for them SUCKS. In a lot of those predominantly black and Latino schools, they can't even do fractions by 8th grade. How in the hell are they supposed to keep up with the city's brightest students?

And finally - This test is NOT THAT SUPER HARD. And this is not me being cocky. I'm not a genius - at all. I got average grades at Stuy and often below average because I cut class so much.

If you don't have the ability to study and pass this test, you shouldn't get in - period. This is affirmative action gone wrong - for a number of reasons - it takes slots away from much more hard working and deserving students, it won't help the students let in that couldn't pass because they can't keep up, it'll dumb down the school, and diversity doesn't only mean black and Latino students.


Thank you for your perspective.
 
Thank you for your perspective.

I forgot to mention one more thing - Most black and Latino students don't even KNOW about the test and don't even take it. That's a failure of their PARENTS.
 
Socialists hate hard working, enterprising individuals as it goes against their idea that everyone needs the state to hold their hand to get by in life. Why do you think Jews are hates so much? Why do you think everyone hated the Brits? People hate overachievers as it exposes their own laziness.

Asians are going to have to accept, as whites have, that they will be hated for being successful regardless of how they achieved it. It's a damn shame, America used to be a country of dynamic, ambitious individuals, it's more and more turning into a country of bitter, hateful people who instead of trying to improve their own lot would rather ruin everyone else's.
 
Just proves that the educational shortcomings of the African and Latino American communities is a social and cultural failure, not an inherent racial feature.

Why do you omit poor whites? Usually in rural areas but not always. They have the same problems as well. And I would say it is a social, cultural, and economic problem.

I know many black women who are highly educated and successful. I think the problem is family structure and values. And it may not be because parents arent taking an interest in thier children and pushing them to achieve academic greatness. Though I am sure there is lots of that happening. But alot of times both parents are so busy working to try and get ahead or to pay bills that they are not around to spend much time with thier kids. Or a single parent who struggles to stay a float. And then there are kids and even adults who dont value a higher education. Who think pursuing one or trying hard in school is dumb or not cool. And then there are people who are too afraid to even try. Because they fear thay trying will leave them with crippling debt from student loans. I had 2 friends. Brother and sister. One went to school for accounting and the other teaching. And they both told me how much they regretted going to school and getting thier degrees. And they didnt know how they would pay them back.
 
Why do you omit poor whites? Usually in rural areas but not always. They have the same problems as well. And I would say it is a social, cultural, and economic problem.

I know many black women who are highly educated and successful. I think the problem is family structure and values. And it may not be because parents arent taking an interest in thier children and pushing them to achieve academic greatness. Though I am sure there is lots of that happening. But alot of times both parents are so busy working to try and get ahead or to pay bills that they are not around to spend much time with thier kids. Or a single parent who struggles to stay a float. And then there are kids and even adults who dont value a higher education. Who think pursuing one or trying hard in school is dumb or not cool. And then there are people who are too afraid to even try. Because they fear thay trying will leave them with crippling debt from student loans. I had 2 friends. Brother and sister. One went to school for accounting and the other teaching. And they both told me how much they regretted going to school and getting thier degrees. And they didnt know how they would pay them back.
Yeah, it certainly applies to them too; just singling out those two because the narrative generally revolves around them.
The demonization of education is the key reason why so much of the American population is so stupid; it’s quite sad really, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to fix it.
 
Yeah, it certainly applies to them too; just singling out those two because the narrative generally revolves around them.
The demonization of education is the key reason why so much of the American population is so stupid; it’s quite sad really, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to fix it.

I have no idea either. Best any one can do is keep driving it into kids heads. Whether its your kid, niece or nephew, or even a neighbor kid.
 
Interesting piece of information regarding Prop 209 in California and Berkeley. People frequently point out that UC Berkeley's number of Asian students went up significantly after the passage of Prop 209. But it appears that the raw numbers might be misleading.

However, studies refute such claims about Prop 209 and AAPIs.17 As the chart below illustrates, it is problematic to assume that Prop 209 ushered in big gains for AAPIs. At UC Berkeley in the nine years prior to Prop 209 AAPI freshmen increased nearly 16 points (from 26% to 41.9%), but in the much longer 16-year period under Prop 209 AAPIs only increased another 6 points (to 48.2%).
https://advancingjustice-la.org/sites/default/files/Advancing Justice - AAPI Higher Ed Diversity.pdf

Also:
Second, the estimates have little to do with affirmative action, as 85% of the simulated gains for AAPIs under their model are attributable to ending “negative action” differentials that Asian Americans face relative to white applicants.

Anyway, it's not exculpatory about Harvard's current system which we'll learn about as the litigation progresses but it is informative as to some of the casual talking points that get thrown around.
 
Socialists hate hard working, enterprising individuals as it goes against their idea that everyone needs the state to hold their hand to get by in life. Why do you think Jews are hates so much? Why do you think everyone hated the Brits? People hate overachievers as it exposes their own laziness.

Asians are going to have to accept, as whites have, that they will be hated for being successful regardless of how they achieved it. It's a damn shame, America used to be a country of dynamic, ambitious individuals, it's more and more turning into a country of bitter, hateful people who instead of trying to improve their own lot would rather ruin everyone else's.

Some people that fancy themselves "intellectuals" resent successful people that never had a formal education but excelled through innovation and hard work.
After years in academia and degrees some believe they were entitled to

step into a panacea of lucrative opportunities. When the red carpet, complete with adoring fans, is no where to be found the tendency is to blame the system. Salt is added when they see people that went straight to the workplace out of high school become highly successful inspite of never having their IQ tested in a academic setting. This has no place in their paradigm and their not about to reasses what they so smugly invested their time and money in.
Suddenly the socialist/Marxist teaching their professors were selling makes perfect sense.
Kids growing up in the commercial fishing industry run into this at a early age. They grow up around principles of hard work (get paid by a percentage of what the boat makes, could be big or not) and see them being played out every day around them. When they show up in class they already have more real world experience then some of their teachers and recognize bs when they hear it.
What is really irksome is that sometimes they already make more than their teachers.
Socialism could sooth this painful resentment.
 
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Interesting piece of information regarding Prop 209 in California and Berkeley. People frequently point out that UC Berkeley's number of Asian students went up significantly after the passage of Prop 209. But it appears that the raw numbers might be misleading.

https://advancingjustice-la.org/sites/default/files/Advancing Justice - AAPI Higher Ed Diversity.pdf

Also:


Anyway, it's not exculpatory about Harvard's current system which we'll learn about as the litigation progresses but it is informative as to some of the casual talking points that get thrown around.

I believe you are biased on this issue based on your earlier comments in this thread and the fact that you are a self admitted minority. Have you personally benefited from affirmative action?

You were implying earlier in this thread that the extracurriculars of Asian applicants may not be weighed as heavily as other extras like sports, etc. Implying that all Asians have as extracurriculars are the stereoptypical musical instrument, etc. When that is simply not true.
 
I believe you are biased on this issue based on your earlier comments in this thread and the fact that you are a self admitted minority. Have you personally benefited from affirmative action?

You were implying earlier in this thread that the extracurriculars of Asian applicants may not be weighed as heavily as other extras like sports, etc. Implying that all Asians have as extracurriculars are the stereoptypical musical instrument, etc. When that is simply not true.

Of course people believe I'm biased but it's mostly because I refuse to accept these tropes as true. Most people like the idea that they're being victimized by these things and so they kneejerk reject alternative explanations.

Have I personally benefitted from these things? Possibly but unlikely. I've tested into the 99th+ percentile of every admissions test that I ever took going all the way back to elementary school. Exception being the LSAT - I left after an hour because I knew I'd done enough to get into most law schools. I never applied to anywhere where my scores wouldn't qualify for the top 15% of their admissions class. Every scholarship I've ever gotten was test score based so strictly merit.

I've been self-employed my entire adult life and have never benefitted from any hiring or promotion programs to help minorities climb the ranks since every dollar I've ever made, I had to generate the client on my own. I don't get promotions or any such thing. My parents made great money when I was a kid so I don't even get the hard luck benefits and such.

I never implied that the extracurriculars of Asians are not weighed heavily. I stated that certain extracurriculars are over represented in admissions criteria and that, in my experience, Asian students tended towards those extracurriculars (as did I). It is not that the extracurriculars of Asians aren't weighed as heavily, it's that extracurriculars like chess club, violin, piano, math club, Model UN, etc aren't weighed as heavily unless you're elite within them. This is just as true if the student is Asian as it is when the student is white, black or hispanic.

For a stretch of time, most of the Ivy League coaches were selling the same formula to students and it included a heavy dose of "brainy" extracurricular activities. And Asian parents have shown a proclivity towards hiring such coaches for their children. Now, before you overreact, Asian are not the only ones doing so.

Now when the Asian student participation in lacrosse, swimming, ceramics club, film club reaches the same rates as the participation in the aforementioned clubs and still aren't being weighed the same then there's an argument to be made but not prior to.

As for the desire to be victims. I've pointed out multiple times that the HArvard and Princeton have faced similar allegations previously and were vindicated. Doesn't mean Harvard prevails this time but it does mean that people's fears in this area aren't new and weren't true in the past. The person bringing this litigation isn't Asian. It's a white guy who has been doing this all over the country primarily with white kids. The bias in Ivy League admissions is far greater in favor of donors, athletes and legacies but the people who are alleging discrimination against Asians are fixated on blaming it on black students. Yet of the previous groups, unqualified black students are a much smaller percentage of Ivy League admissions that unqualified whites who play the right sports, have rich parents and are legacies. I even included additional information showing that 85% of the alleged discrimination against Asian students is probably coming from these underqualified white kids, not blacks or hispanics.

Yet because the common opinion is lay the blame for various social ills at the feet of black and hispanic communities inability to perform or their cultural unwillingness to excel, most of the above gets overlooked for the superficial and simplistic - "Look at the test scores. The only possible explanation must be aggressive affirmative action in favor of blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians." Yet every village idiot knows that test scores and GPAs have never been the sole admissions criteria to college, not even the elite ones.

People prefer the boogeyman they're comfortable with, even if it's probably not real.
 
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