<story><title>Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans</title><url>http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination-lawsuit-data.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gourial</author><text>By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it&amp;#x27;s something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats.&lt;p&gt;While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look back on them with scorn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make &lt;i&gt;1&amp;#x2F;3&lt;/i&gt; less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero.&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific&amp;#x2F;engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable.&lt;p&gt;History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”&lt;p&gt;EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.</text></comment>
<story><title>Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans</title><url>http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination-lawsuit-data.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gourial</author><text>By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it&amp;#x27;s something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats.&lt;p&gt;While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look back on them with scorn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>&amp;gt; By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not really accurate. If you look at the Coleman report, the main study that was done in the run up to school desegregation and forced busing, it showed a bunch of negative impacts to changing the racial balance of institutions too quickly. That research was largely ignored, which in part lead to white flight, inner city gangs, and a bunch of other issues we still haven&amp;#x27;t really recovered from to this day.&lt;p&gt;Contrast this to the integration of gays in the military, which was done over a few years rather than all at once and went much more smoothly -- you didn&amp;#x27;t see any major issues or society-wide backlash as a result.&lt;p&gt;The point is that policies that ignore race often make racial issues more salient and pronounced as a result, rather than leading to a society where race isn&amp;#x27;t a factor or whatever. That&amp;#x27;s not to say that Harvard isn&amp;#x27;t doing anything wrong, but it&amp;#x27;s naive to assume that ignoring race is going to lead to some sort of post racial society.&lt;p&gt;C.f.: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pages.jh.edu&amp;#x2F;jhumag&amp;#x2F;0400web&amp;#x2F;18.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pages.jh.edu&amp;#x2F;jhumag&amp;#x2F;0400web&amp;#x2F;18.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually still one of the biggest studies ever done and probably that ever will be done, because it was conducted before they really understood the math behind representative samples and statistical significance, so it had way more participants than were actually needed.</text></comment>