I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the Asian kid who was born in poverty, got bullied in school, struggled all his life to achieve the grades and stats to qualify for a top school, then got rejected in favor of a rich black American kid, since he was born with the wrong skin color.
Hmm, this is not a good criticism of affirmative action programs. A child from a rich family, of whatever race, is far more likely to be able to attend the college of their (or their parents') choice, based on a wide array of factors. This is mitigated somewhat by federal and institutional need-based and merit-based aid, but I don't think it's really supportable to say that it's exacerbated by affirmative action. If your concern really is that poor students aren't able to access as many opportunities as wealthy students, you should be some flavor of socialist, as under capitalism, wealth inherently comes with more opportunity.
In clearer words: I think you made this situation up without considering other factors because you have an ideological agenda.
I'm always open to being wrong, but I'm also pretty confident that you lack in reading comprehension skills. The argument GP was making was about affirmative action being a net negative for impoverished students, and this is, as far as I can tell, utterly irrelevant to that argument.
Most of the words in the comment I replied to were dedicated to describing the economic status of the hypothetical people involved, and I think I did a good job of making it clear that that's what I was responding to.
> One wonders if slaves had other factors too.
This strikes me as deeply irrelevant and a major rhetorical escalation. My argument was that it's unreasonable to link economic discrimination and racial affirmative action.
> this is not a good criticism of affirmative action programs.
I then pointed out we have statistics showing affirmative action unfairly disadvantages Asians and that the supreme court is going to hear arguments about it.
"but but ... I was talking about ECONOMIC discrimination!".
No, you're just a fan of weasel words.
What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities (I know because this is a common defense). Apparently citing standardized test scoring as a reason for accepting less black applicants is racist, but citing soft skills as a reason for accepting less asian students isn't.
I see your point, and I apologize for not being as clear as I could have been. I do still think that "this could make a poor, hardworking Asian kid not get a college position because of a rich Black kid" is a very bad criticism; it conflates some very emotionally resonant topics in a way that isn't justifiable. I also think that this conflation was done for ideological reasons.
I do want to respond to this, though:
> What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities
No, I wasn't. By other factors I meant the other things the GP brought up: economics (" born in poverty"), being 'weird' or just not fitting in (which I felt was implied by "got bullied in school"), and nationality ("a rich black American kid" implies, at least to me, that our hypothetical Asian student isn't American). All of these have significant impacts in school admissions, especially nationality, which can make prospective students ineligible for some kinds of aid.
Well, why call that out in a hypothetical if it's not a difference? If GP had called out the hypothetical Asian student's height or weight or video game preference but not the hypothetical black student's, I would have assumed that was significantly different as well.
Indeed, there is no way that I did that. GP specified that one of the two was American, and didn't specify that the other was, so I assumed it was a relevant difference.
> I think you made this situation up without considering other factors because you have an ideological agenda.
> Arcidiacono shows that, after narrowing down applicants to those with the strongest objective academic qualifications, Asian Americans were far more likely than blacks or Hispanics to receive a low personality score from admissions officers.
So we know for a fact that Asians received lower "personality" scores than blacks and hispanics, as a racial group and regardless of their financial status, and these lower "personality" scores were used as a basis to reject Asians and accept black and hispanic candidates.
TL;DR we know for a fact this exact thing is happening.
Yeah, that sounds like racial discrimination against Asian students! You'll note that I did not say there was no such thing as racial discrimination against Asian students, so I'm not sure how this is relevant.
So we know there is racial discrimination against Asians based on their race, and in favor of blacks and hispanics. Yet when I cited an example of an Asian kid getting rejected in favor of a black kid, you claimed I invented it. When you now admit we know it is happening.
At no point did I say that wasn't happening. I was responding to your comment about economic factors. Did I misunderstand your original comment? You said:
> I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the Asian kid who was born in poverty, got bullied in school, struggled all his life to achieve the grades and stats to qualify for a top school, then got rejected in favor of a rich black American kid
Is this not about the interaction between economic status and race in the context of affirmative action?
