Comment by LightHugger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LightHugger | Hacker News Reader

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People point out issues with affirmative action literally all the time without racial slurs, it's how the majority of discussions on the topic go. What does it mean for you to see a rare instance of extremist hackers defacing a website, and go "it's telling", you are hinting that some of your confirmation bias got fueled while avoiding being more than vague about your actual thoughts.

Where is the adult conversation you claimed to want? We can talk about the reality that racial discrimination fuels racial tensions in general. That we have now reached a point in society where there are numerous mismatches in discrimination, in some places you are likely to be discriminated against if you're black, in some places you are likely to be discriminated against if you are white. The goal of ending racial discrimination was to end discrimination not just shift around the targets. It's unfortunate how people don't seem to realize that.

College admissions have been a disaster for some time, whether it be discrimination, legacy, prep school pipeline corruption or affirmative action leading to "positive discrimination". Asians are obviously being adversely impacted today.

The real problem is classism and economic diversity more than racial diversity now. Schools like Harvard are moderately diverse on race, but economically not at all.. something like 90% of kids come from families that are upper income.

If you are trying to raise all boats, then economic class is a better method since given the relative amount of people .. there are actually more poor white people than any other race, even if white people experience poverty at a relatively lower % rate.

This also avoids all the racial resentment / reverse racism issues.

So there's your adult conversation, but I don't think OP posting a link to a racist defacement of a website was looking for that.

I agree with your points, especially about economic class. I've been thinking since the original occupy wall street protests that there's been a shift towards pitting people against each other on the basis of other identity rather than class. Maybe it's been an intentional push to create infighting and divert people away from eating the rich or whatever.

I usually don't pay too much mind to trying to guess what the OP might want, rather the topic has been raised here so it's a good conversation to have.

> Where is the adult conversation you claimed to want?

There is a place for a conversation on the merits of affirmative action, but this isn't that place.

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