Hacker News Reader

Comment by thworp | Hacker News Reader

The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.

As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.

View on HN

And that would be my biggest concern about AA (certainly at hyper-elite institutions like Harvard) - it does little to address cultural issues among disadvantaged communities that work against social mobility, including the degree to which formal education is seen as worth pursuing. It may even further entrench such attitudes in some cases. At best, one might hope that if enough members of such communities did successfully navigate the ivy league system and prosper from it, it would prove something of an inspiration to others, but I suspect it's a fairly weak effect.

Also, embedded stereotypes are strengthened when the bottom of every class is full of AA admissions.

Is that actually what happens though? And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students? I can't imagine they're just taking in students to satisfy quotas despite them obviously not being capable of excelling in their chosen course.

Yes, I remember seeing an interview with a retired Ivy League professor (sadly don't remember who). He pointed out that many of the AA admitted students struggled with the intense demands of places like Harvard or MIT, but they would do really well at a slightly less elite university. Being consistently worse at everything than your fellow students surely doesn't help self esteem and confidence.

Now, some professors have actually started grading differently according to racial criteria. This will further wreak havoc, because the students know quite well how they stack up to their peers. It makes the "helped" student dependent on being given advantadges, which I think is by design. If your success in life depended on a gigantic bureaucracy of discrimination, would you be in favour of abolishing it?

Yes. Consider the case of Sandra A. Sellers, who was cancelled and fired after remarking that black students consistently end up at the bottom of her class: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/georgetown-university-...

It's a real problem, and you can see why nobody is addressing it honestly when these are the consequences of doing so.

> And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students?

Yes, very much so. It's no secret that we're starting to see a bi-modal distribution of outcomes for top school students. Contrary to the myth, graduating Harvard isn't (at least, no longer) a ticket to an exceptional career. Plenty of graduates proceed to have a normal (or worse) career that isn't better from what a graduate of a lower-tier school would achieve.

In tech, that means that while some top school grads end up in high-flying unicorns and desirable FAANG positions, others end up in sleepers like Oracle.

  > Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.

lets just say for arguments sake that is true, the question then becomes how did it get that way? was it like that in the 60s and 70s and 80s? did something change between now and then?

It goes back way further. For education specifically I'd recommend this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpzsJT1snd8 as well as Sowell's book on Affirmative ACtion.

The book Black Rednecks and White Liberals explores the cultural dimension pretty extensively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com