I completely agree. Up until the final paragraph of the article, the point the author seemed to be making is "rich people will do better in college so only rich people should go to college."
More like, affirmative action actually secretly benefits rich people versus poor boat people.
“ I’m supposed to understand that a first generation kid whose parents started their flight from Laos on a raft made from tires are the beneficiaries of the cultural biases of a bunch of ETS employees?”
Which he doesn’t cite statistics showing these folks are the ones disadvantaged by the policy (though I agree lumping all Asians together doesn’t make sense).
If the author gave you that impression then he truly failed to communicate his point. The author is a Marxist who has written a book (plugged in the article) against the entire system of education-based meritocracy. He most certainly does not believe education should be reserved exclusively for the rich. Instead, he’s in favour of a large social safety net that allows struggling students to opt out of the education system without giving up on life.
Yes, exactly. His ultimate point in this article, if I understood that right (i.e., affirmative action can be helpful, but it is the beginning, not the end of the support for those people it helps) I find quite reasonable. Everything leading up to that point seemed to be saying "the system is doing exactly what it was intended to, the people who think this is fixable are fools, we should just leave it alone." I think a lot of people who might otherwise agree with his point would get lost in the liberal-bashing.
I had a Marxist teacher in high school, and I wanted to learn more about it, so I read a lot of Marx and other foundational socialist literature. I was very confused every time he infused racialism into contemporary issues, which didn’t seem to exist anywhere in the doctrine. I came to understand that racialism and genderism are mostly just tactics to dismantle capitalism ‘by any means neccessary’. But these are the same division tactics that utopian Marxists accuse capitalists of exploiting in class warfare. From that vantage point, the distinction fades between the depictions of capitalist exploitation and of revolutionary Marxism. It turns out that politics and war are defined more by tactics than doctrine, and tactics themselves by effectiveness rather than any moral or rational basis. This seems to be the point actually, of revolutionary Marxists, who observed that “power comes from the barrel of a gun”, and adapted their tactics to match, to win the battle over their utopian doctrine. If they had logically recursed one layer deeper, they would have seen that they are not fighting for the doctrine, they are fighting for the fighting. The other side is also full of empty philosophy, and the distinction between doctrines fades away when given either their best interpretation, or their worst.
So I wonder what he means by calling himself a Marxist. Clearly he’s diverging from the party lines.
“ I’m supposed to understand that a first generation kid whose parents started their flight from Laos on a raft made from tires are the beneficiaries of the cultural biases of a bunch of ETS employees?”
Which he doesn’t cite statistics showing these folks are the ones disadvantaged by the policy (though I agree lumping all Asians together doesn’t make sense).