[wbraun]

Reading through the paper, I think the real buried lead here is that the reviewers discriminated in favor of selecting black and hispanic applicants, with a larger effect size than anything analyzed but test scores and attractive vs unattractive (not neutral vs unattractive). This includes obesity, grades / class rank, research publications, and honor society membership.

At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.

[elil17]

Yeah, but at least reviewers being biased towards Black and Hispanic applicants have some reason to be: they are trying to correct for society-wide discrimination. You can argue that it's not their place to do that, or that trying to do that on a case by case basis is unfair, etc., but it is at least some reason.

Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.

[boogies]

> they are trying to correct for society-wide discrimination

Ironically, it turns out that discrimination against minorities + discrimination against majorities = worse outcomes for everyone.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...

[kayson]

I came across similar conclusions when researching CA Prop 16, and it makes sense. Many affirmative action-ed students, by virtue of their systematic disadvantage, just can't keep up with their more privileged colleagues. I'm really disappointed, though, that the authors did not address the fact that this "mismatch" is still just another symptom of the problem affirmative action is trying to solve.

[SamReidHughes]

If you think these students faced a systematic disadvantage that made them unable to answer multiple choice questions about basic math problems, or material they were supposed to have learned during undergrad, you ought to point out what it actually is, and how big an effect size it has, and why.

[john_moscow]

Elephant in the room: most of the "privilege" you are talking about is literally parents giving a damn and pouring endless time and energy into teaching stuff to their kids and trying to engrave delayed gratification into their personality.

But instead of rewarding and praising this behavior, and trying to make it a role model for the struggling minorities, we try to punish and discourage the kids that have learned the skills with their parents' help, so they won't succeed in life either.

Of course, this doesn't affect the "admission by donation" kind of families, that leaves me wonder: is it about helping minorities succeed, or is it about replacing arrogant self-reliant challengers with grateful and loyal underperformers, to further entrench the elites' position?

[PeterisP]

One form of discrimination begets another - since subpopulations often happen to be quite different in various aspects, positive discrimination towards one racial or ethnic group would be expected to cause some discrimination of other factors that happen to be correlated with belonging to that group.

[collyw]

they are trying to correct for percieved society-wide discrimination

[AmericanChopper]

In my experience, most racists think that their views are motivated by noble intentions in one way or another.

[asciident]

After reading your sentence, it occurred to me that it's no longer clear in today's age if you're referring to people using racial discrimination to hire underrepresented groups as racist, or the ones who oppose racial-based hiring and only hiring on "merit" as racist because they oppose race-based preferential hiring.

[sonotathrowaway]

I don’t think it matters. In general people that do harm to others in any way believe their actions are justified. It’s not special to racism, humans as a whole are pretty averse to causing unjustified harm to others.

[jmpman]

You mean the ones who follow the law as defined by Title VII of the Civil Rights bill?

[t-writescode]

When the privileged classes have had generations to generate social networks that connect privileged people with privileged people (arguably one of the greatest privileges white people have, along with generational wealth and societies general presuppositions that go along with it), is it so bad to actively recognize that and go against it?

Racism says an ethnicity is better or worse than another intrinsically.

This is recognizing a section of our population has been, by and large, historically kept from making those connections and intentionally favoring them, not just for their sake but for the sake of their children’s children, by working to get them the same levels of connections the privileged class has historically had.

[someperson]

Racial groups are themselves not homogeneous.

There are plenty of eg, black doctors who raise privileged black children, and plenty of eg, poor rural whites who grew up in poverty.

Race-based affirmative action based on race doesn't do a good job of addressing the systemic problems with economic opportunity, and just causes rifts within society.

[majormajor]

Opportunity-based affirmative action is something that I think would be desperately useful, but ... it would run into a lot of the same perceptual problems as race-based programs.

The historical lines correlate strongly (though yes, not 100%) with race so the white kid who's in the program as a result of the affirmative action who grew up in a poor area with poor schools is going to blend in with the "regular" whites whereas the black kid who was the child of doctors is going to still be judged on the first thing people notice about them - their skin.

Fixing our past sins will take both proactive action AND continual vigilance by all of us to fight our snap judgments and first impressions.

But I believe it would be MUCH better than today's "merit" based systems which just create insane amount of pressure on kids starting in middle school or even earlier, to pad resumes and compete for the best schools, etc. That's a race to the (mental health) bottom of a whole different sort.

[tachyonbeam]

Tell that to the cis-white-male who was raised on a trailer park by a single mom when you explain to him why he doesn't get a scholarship though. Not everyone who's white or male is in a position of relative privilege. Affirmative action can create new forms of injustices as well. Somehow nowadays we think that deciding who gets what on the basis of sex and skin color is A-OK, because we're doing it right, we're doing it for the greater good... What could possibly go wrong?

[krimi]

Im pretty sure a cis white male can get a scholarship if coming from a poor background. This link for examplw comes first when doing a quick google search, and everyone on their promo picture is white: http://www.collegescholarships.org/scholarships/low-income.h...

[collyw]

In the UK white working class males (who received free school meals - an indicator of poverty) are the least likely group to go to university.

[jmpman]

With the same grades as others?

[scarmig]

Are Asian Americans privileged? For example, would you say that Vietnamese refugees and descendants of trafficked Chinese railroad laborers have been celebrated and given unfair advantages by white society?

[mushbino]

This is an extremely touchy and hotbutton issue. Many scholors have researched this very topic quite a bit. It helps to illustrate the point when you look into historical tensions between the black and Asian communities, especially in California.

Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community as there hasn't been a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to any of the Asian communities. Compare that with the history and treatment of the black community and you can trace a direct line from slavery to where many communities are today. A lot of propaganda regarding black people had been fed to whites for hundreds of years in order to justify their enslavement.

The black community has seen Asians as a "preferred minority" who has benefited from their civil rights work and at the same time given opportunities they didn't have without giving back to black communities.

There is a lot of nuance in there, but that's the super short version.

[collyw]

> Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community

I am based in Europe so I maybe things are different here. We still hear a lot about how minorities are discriminated against, but it always seems based on equality of outcome as the "proof", and it seems to be pretty selective where they are looking. I see little evidence of real discrimination in fact most people seem quite disgusted by it.

[sonotathrowaway]

Asian-American encompasses an very diverse set of experiences in America, you can’t really create a cohesive narrative in the same way you could with other groups. The fact that you easily identify different groups with very distinct experiences should clue you in to that.

[scarmig]

So your claim is that Asian-Americans are diverse, while black and Hispanic people each form unvariegated, homogeneous identities?

I very intentionally point out particular groups in my original comment, because proponents of race-based affirmative action always avoid grappling with why it's fair to discriminate against some relatively successful subgroups of Asian Americans by bringing up red herrings about Hmong and Cambodian refugees (who, it's worth pointing out, are typically excluded from the benefits of affirmative action anyway, which makes it even more of a red herring).

[SuoDuanDao]

>The way you could with other groups

Who is 'you' white man?

[0-_-0]

I'm a white person, where can I find this mythical social network and generational wealth I can use?

[mushbino]

Traditionally? Ivy league schools or your parent's network that probably came from the same.

Being white in America, or really anywhere else in the world comes with its privileges. If you haven't taken advantage of them, that's your own fault.

[snicky]

Not sure about America, but I don't understand what do you mean by saying that being white anywhere in the world comes with priviliges. I am a white male from a Eastern European country where 99.9% of people are the same race. How am I priviliged and in comparison to who?

[AmericanChopper]

My parents were both drug addicts. How can I get in touch with their Ivy League network contacts?

[scarmig]

As an interesting thought experiment:

Suppose we created a national social graph, and gave each person a value in it. High prestige, high social access people automatically get a certain high rating, and other nodes are given fractional social access ratings dependent on their neighboring nodes. The devil's in the details here, but you get the idea.

Affirmative action could then be targeted depending on your level of social access. The less you have, the more affirmative action you get. This would allow for a lot more mixing of the social graph and result in a gradual leveling over time.

Is this appealing, in lieu of race-based affirmative action?

[t-writescode]

How would you go about selling and implementing this in a way that wouldn't be political suicide?

[AmericanChopper]

It is racist to implement systems of racial discrimination. There is no way that you could modify the meaning of the word racism to the point that it no longer includes racial discrimination.

Racism also doesn’t presuppose any particular motive. There are many reasons that somebody could choose to be racist, and if you look at real world racists, you’ll find that they offer a wide variety of justifications for their views. Just as you have done in this comment. You are making the argument that your racism is morally righteous, and that it will create positive outcome (which, coincidentally, certainly isn’t an uncommon position for racists to take).

You’ve also made the mistake of presuming that the problem you describe requires a racist solution. It absolutely doesn’t. If wealth creates more inter-generational wealth, and poverty creates more inter-generational poverty, then you need a solution for social mobility, not to artificially elevate people based on ethnic group membership (which of course also disadvantages others based on their different ethnic group membership). A poor white or Asian kid, who’s family has always been poor, is going to face the same socio-economic disadvantages that you’re describing, and a wealthy black kid isn’t going to be facing them at all. The solution your offering (aside from being racist) doesn’t solve the problem you’re describing. In many cases, it actually makes it worse, because if you look at how such systems operate, you’ll find that a decent portion of the people who benefit from them actually come from relatively well off families.

[Blahah]

*lede, for fun etymological reasons: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

[474637374]

Is it actually buried though when the context is America? It seems like this kind of behavior should be assumed as default when this sort of outcome is exactly what American advocacy groups have been persuing for years. If equity only matters for minorities then an org is just going to err on the side of caution and favor minorities.