> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, […] Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission.
This is a nice story, but actually not true.
If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed as blacks in the US, but they should thus get at least equivalent treatment as whites and hispanics, not worse.