The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
Maybe. I think it's because they are a small population being discriminated against heavily, versus a much larger population being discriminated against mildly. It seems far more egregious in the case of Asians when you look at the disparities in test scores required for admissions to these institutions by race.
Create a minimum criteria to succeed in a program and simply randomly choose the students from that pool is a reasonable solution that avoids much of the discriminatory issues and likely results in a more diverse student body.
Assuming Affirmative Action is still in place, once the current generation of Asian Ivy League grad's kids start applying for schools, this issue will start to apply to Asian kids as well.
[1] https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/less-than-half-of-us-chil...
However, nobody is entitled to a slot in a private university.
Public schools should optimize for equality of opportunity, but private schools should be free to use other measures as long as they dont go against civil rights act. This includes maximizing profit or legacy students.
https://www.chicagojewishnews.com/how-many-jewish-students-a...
Now it is necessarily true that if we try to discriminate in favor of some group (eg blacks), we must necessarily give them an advantage over another group (eg whites). But the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites.
But there is NO argument for doing what these universities are doing. To identify racial groups that they want to discriminate against because they are too good. I see no difference between policies to discriminate against Asians today and historical policies to put quotas on how many Jews got accepted. And I doubt that there is much coincidence about which universities engaged in both policies.
Although this is what they claim, it's hard to believe sometimes. Look at the meltdown that accompanied some smart alecs putting up posters that said nothing beyond "It's OK to be white". Wokesters went mad and started tearing them down anywhere the posters were found, implying that in their mind it is actually very much not OK to be white.
Of course, the problem here is that the woke aren't actually using race words to mean the actual skin color. It's all coded speech to hide the true target of their hatred - anyone who isn't as far left as they are. That's why they go nuts when they encounter black conservatives, or why you see white people are perfectly OK criticizing things like "whiteness". They aren't engaging in self criticism there, they've just established a convention amongst their community that "white" is coded speech for conservatives.
Scott Alexander has a great essay that examines this in depth:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
This is an argument put forth in bad faith. The thought - agree or disagree - is white individuals in America have systemic advantages that persist due to historical social practices the manifest across many years of education and just existence in life in America. It's not about "deserving less" but about acknowledging they nudges in their favor many had along the way.
I'm not going to debate the veracity of that thought on a forum, but it's not some sort of punitive belief.
It seems that this is simply the argument for why the punitive belief is just.
In other words: in some decision-making settings non-White groups have a procedural weight in their favor to minimally counterbalance the way society has objectively and still measurably disadvantaged them for generations. If you want to call that "punishment" because White people "deserve it" then fine. However, I personally think that's semi-dishonest semantics that may be technically correct in the most literal sense of the word, but is not expressed in a way commensurate with the parlance of our times.
I fully agree that certain individuals face significant structural disadvantages. I actually think that most people, including those seeking social justice, are blind to many of those structural disadvantages because they find them distasteful to admit, and too adjacent to racist talking points.
If one recognizes that structural advantage exist, as we do, the questions become the appropriate methods and timeline for resolving inequity. This last one is particularly complex, and almost never discussed in any context. The reality is that even in the best case scenario, true equality without a hand on the scale will be a multi-generational project.
Regarding methods, I think it is important to note that while racial groups share many similar experiences, suffering takes place at the individual level, and individual circumstances vary widely. Heavy handed policies that treat all blacks or all whites as equivalent to each other will always have a lot of inherent injustice and collateral damage baked into them. A poor white immigrant from Ukraine is not the same as a rich white bankers son. A rich black immigrant is not the same as poor inner city child with the baggage of 200 years of systemic racism.
When folk talk of procedural advantage based on race, what many people hear is "you are acceptable collateral damage".
I think the more the conversation admits who will suffer and benefit from efforts to reduce inequities of birth, the more honest and productive discussion we can have.
I think this is a semantic distinction of your own making. I don't deny either exist, phrase it how you want. I said "procedural advantage", you can say "procedural disadvantage" if you must. It's "deserve" and "punishment" I have a problem with.
> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.
Agree. And I believe we owe it to marginalized groups to put our hand on the scale. How hard we press I believe can and should be debated.
I generally agree with the rest of your statement. There is no way to have a perfect system, but that acknowledgement is usually used to justify doing nothing vs. doing something and thus reinforcing (and potentially worsening) the disparities.