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Comment by tstactplsignore | Hacker News Reader

This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no.

It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.

Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.

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It's an ideological disaster. Viewing this through a white v/s black lens is itself too simplistic. Look at the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit. Asians are in fact and provably being discriminated against. This is also the case in immigration policy. DEI/affirmative action policies were created by the executive and are being undone by the executive.

>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.

A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.

Shocker, a majority white country voted to end programs that identified biases which benefitted them...

> Asians are in fact being discriminated against

I have a feeling someone fed you some false information about this case.

The judges ruled that Harvard's admission program violated the equal protections act, but never said once that Asian Americans were ever discriminated against.

The programs that these decisions got rid of impacted minorities other than Asians a lot more, but for some reason you don't want to talk about that?

That is because none of your colleagues who think so would ever tell you. The problem with this is that the ideology has led to a point where I and many like me will simply never tell someone like yourself what they think of.

Even now that it's "better" I would only write something like this anonymously in fear of a future person seeing and judging my beliefs. I have personally watched in corporate and academia the effects. I am small fish but have personally wanted to hire someone who I thought was the most qualified for the position and was rather non obviously told to not because the team already had to many white men. We instead had to go with my 3rd choice a female who while great did not have the technical skills I valued in the first.

The main problem is people who say things like you do is that you don't realize you have a very incomplete picture. Those who disagree with the ideas will literally never say them. In many career paths saying your beliefs that don't align is basically career suicide.

> This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once.

This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court...). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against on the basis of their race. Just because you don't personally see the racism doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Why are so many people saying "Asians and whites were discriminated against" and pointing to this case?

The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)

Just because you personally see racism, doesn't mean it's actually happening(aka, "facts don't care about your feelings")

> The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)

What on Earth are you talking about? Here are the 237 pages of the Supreme Justices exploring centuries of American law and hundreds of relevant cases regarding racial discrimination: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

Specifically, the Justices found Harvard's race-based admissions practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that these practices resulted in racial discrimination against Asian American applicants.

Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?

> Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?

No, but it looks like a lot of people are misunderstanding the court's ruling...

`The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Four- teenth Amendment`

"This admission system is not lawful" is not the same as "your institution has been illegally discriminatory towards a certain race". One is pointing out mismatches between law and reality, the other needs to be backed up by data.

Is it quite possible that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed because they were being illegally discriminatory in their admission practices?

Yes it is, but the court case only answered the first question and previous court cases failed to get a satisfactory(for the conservative groups behind them) ruling on the "illegal discrimination" parts.

It's also possible that the "unconstitutional" program lead to satisfactory results for minority groups(both asian and non-asian), but we are just guessing either way based off of a ruling that's only tangentially related.

1. So if the supreme court ended 'racial discrimination' at universities in 2023, why is the administration destroying scientific organizations now in the name of doing so?

2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?

1. It ended one specific form of racial discrimination, not all forms.

2. The user I replied to stated they have not been discriminated against. I corrected them.

Even if it's a delusion, people believe it and I think we should take it seriously and help them see through that delusion.

I'm not advocating for shutting down these departments at all, or slashing and burning research.

I'm hoping that we can help people realize that people love them and care about them and support them more than they could ever imagine, even if they're a white man.

I say this as a white man who has dated black women and had them say some really harsh things about me as a white man, only to realize that often it was an internal conflict that they had about being black but also liking some things from white culture. Some of them had been called white by their own black communities, and so feeling stuck between those worlds.

I think the vast majority of us just need to learn how to deal with emotional attacks, to realize life is combat and everyone is trying to deal with innumerable conflicts at the same time, all the time.

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