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You really check all the doesn't-want-to-understand boxes with this post. It's like a textbook in attempting to discredit through non sequitur.

Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?

Second-guessing lived experience (it turns out that people subject to racism are actually quite good at telling when it's happening to them), check.

It's because the classes are difficult.

Seriously, think for even one second about the implication you're making here.

Why don't you just say African-american students. Asians and Hispanics are also minorities.

"All lives matter!" It's not the author's responsibility to tackle the perfect at the expense of the good.

They were never treated any differently in class.

You have no idea how they were treated. They do. Let them speak.

>> It's because the classes are difficult.

> Seriously, think for even one second about the implication you're making here.

Seriously, read the article before commenting. The author said that the class in question is Stanford's CS "weed out" class.

A "weed out" class is a class designed to be (1) difficult, and (2) come early in a major. The idea is that if you can get through the weed out class, you should be able to get through the rest of the classes in that major.

The theory is that by putting one of the hardest classes first, you avoid students ending up in the terrible position of spending 3 or 4 years majoring in one field and then have to give up and either drop out or switch majors when they hit a difficult required class that they just cannot get through.

Despite your numerous edits, you've missed the point entirely, which is that the GP posited that the reason the class tends towards homogeneity is its difficulty. The implication is that minorities are not as smart. I really didn't feel like I had to spell this out, but here we are.

The implication is that minorities are not as smart.

Or that they have some other reason to have not learned as much (say, worse primary schools? differing cultural values?).

It is very well known that affirmative action tends to take the form of lowering standards for the groups being favored. If this is in fact true, running into a non-biased filter would tend to undo some of its effects. As noted towards the end of the post you're calling offensive (We also need to remember that many universities have quotas for minorities and give extra points on the SAT for just checking a box.). If this is not true... a weed-out class would not be observed to change the class demographics.

So the question then is, if an institution has a policy of affirmative action as part of an effort to address structural imbalances in access to opportunities prior to college, don't they then owe it to those students to not then use 'weed-out' classes to weed them out before they have a chance to catch up?

There are reasons besides differences in smartness and racism that can lead to some people not making it past a difficult weed out class, especially one in a STEM field.

For instance, students from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to have had serious prior exposure to computer science before coming to Stanford, such as through high school computer science classes with well equipped computer labs. Students from much poorer backgrounds might not have had these pre-college opportunities.

This can make their first CS class harder for them--especially when it is a weed out class at a top CS school.

So you might have four kinds of students.

1. Those who had significant CS experience before Stanford, and came to Stanford with the intent of majoring in CS.

2. Those who had significant CS experience before Stanford, but came intending to major in something else, but are taking the intro CS course to see what CS is like.

3. Those without a significant pre-Stanford CS background, but came intending to major in CS.

4. Those without a significant pre-Stasnford CS background, and came intending to major in something else, but are taking the intro CS course to see what it is like.

Those in group #1 will have the best chance of not getting weeded out.

Those in #2 will also have a good chance, because of their background.

#3 is more iffy. Their school background lacks CS, but they intended to be CS majors, so many of them will have self-studied CS to make up for their poor formal education.

#4...these people are going to have a seriously hard time. They are much less likely than the #3 people to have done anything to make up for their high school's inadequacies in CS.

I'd expect the distribution of minorities among these four groups to skew towards #3 and #4, and so I'd expect them to get hit more by the weed out class. This is not because they are not as smart--they are just not as well prepared coming in due to inequalities in pre-college education.

TL;DR: the pipeline problem doesn't start at college.

Say you have a class that starts out with 30 students. 18 white, 10 asian, 2 black.

Say the course is very hard and it cuts 2/3rds of the total students. If the cuts were proportional by race, we now have 6 white, 4 asian, and 0 blacks.

There was no racism involved in the class, the fact that no blacks remain is a result of the class brutally weeding out 2/3rds of the students and that the initial number of blacks was very low.

You can quibble over numbers, but the basic idea remains that large percentage cuts in an unbalanced population can make it tend more toward homogeneity.

That's a good numerical analysis. However, you also have to account for the fact that, on average, black children in the US get a poorer education. There are studies and statistics and on and on. Is it controversial to think that somebody might be less smart because they got a worse education? And then is it so surprising that when they get into Stanford due to affirmative action, they can't handle the course load? The whole system is a mess.

It looks like people are downvoting this which is hilarious because it is accurate. If you assume proportionality this will happen.

>it turns out that people subject to racism are actually quite good at telling when it's happening to them

Not always. Just have a look at the Ellen Pao trial, and the github "sexism" episode. (Sexism rather than racism in both these cases).

Sometimes people just infer a nefarious motive or bias that doesn't actually exist.

You may not like the implication, but it's there. It's a fact. Even when brought in via affirmative action, minorities are consistently weeded out at higher rates than, say, whites or men. No implications needs to be made because the statistics are there for everyone to see. And this is a bad thing, but not like you think.

This is where I mainly take issue with the contemporary SJW/PC types. The fact that some minorities (for the sake of argument let's take white men v black women) are underrepresented in the number of, say, CS graduates is a bad thing, a problem that needs solving. The way to go about this, in my view, is not, and I repeat, not, by just admitting/hiring more black women to universities/companies despite being lower qualified than white men. We could do this, and pat ourselves in the back for a job well done and leave with our outstanding moral fibre confirmed, and be very politically correct. But that changes nothing.

The fact is that to solve this complex issue we need to look into the root causes of the problem that causes black people to perform statistically worse in tests, or women to be less likely to enroll in a CS degree. And that takes a whole hell lot more effort than superficially sweeping the issue under the rug with affirmative action et al. It would be a massive undertaking that would involve shakeups at the core of our society. Naturally the champions of the politically correct aren't so inclined, and prefer to simply sit and be outraged by, and offering as only solution to simply "cheat" until the statistics seem agreeable. And that, I stress, alters none of the core societal problems that caused those twisted statistics in the first place.

I don't know about you, but I would prefer to see these problems rectified and true equality of opportunity be established rather than just shrugging it off and twisting the statistics until they are "good enough".

It would be a massive undertaking that would involve shakeups at the core of our society.

Maybe.

If the main issue is cultural attitudes (either of the people in question, or of the people running the schools), sure.

But if it's mostly about access to resources (as suggested in another post here, time-at-keyboard), that's merely a large undertaking and doesn't need to be coordinated as well. In this case, the greatest requires resource would probably be patience.

A very anecdotal example is that my white parents were very lenient and I very few chores or responsibilities growing up so I spent my extra time on the computer, whereas my black friends were always shocked at how much free time my parents gave me.

All I have is my personal experiences to go on but as a white guy I was never asked that question while a CS undergrad - and that was in Texas where people are extremely polite and helpful to strangers.

It's fairly simple. Young students are often spotted trying to find some location on campus. There aren't as many women taking CS. Even fewer black women.

Therefore people's expectations upon seeing a young black woman in the CS department is that she's lost.

That does not make those people racist and I didn't think the author was claiming any such thing. It may mean the system as a whole is racist or perpetuating older racist policies through societal inertia. When those problems are solved we would expect the percentage of black female CS students to roughly track the general population... Then they won't be unicorns and people's default expectations will change.

There are plenty of studies that show that underrepresented minorities are, in fact, treated differently. Did your African-American classmates affirmatively tell you that they didn't feel like they were treated differently, or was that your own inference? (I notice you qualified that they were never treated differently "in class".)

And contrary to your implication, people don't have to be "racist" to treat people differently. It may just be unfamiliarity, but the net effect is still to give those subject to it a feeling of not belonging.

Everyone has to put the work in.

Maybe. But the amount of work needed to prove that you are "one of the team" is certainly not the same for everyone, no matter how much you want that to be the case.

> We also need to remember that many universities have quotas for minorities

Quotas for minorities have been bright-line illegal for decades (at least since Regents v. Bakke in 1978). So, if you are going to argue that many universities are outright breaking the law, you probably should support that with something.

Public or private?

What is amazing is that it's a mainstay in American entertainment that an underdog fights against oppression and proves the naysayers wrong and ascends to the top.

Yet so many Americans apparently believe that people are so fragile that a few offensive comments, or even statements meant to help (!) (albeit possibly in a clueless fashion) are ultra-damaging and a huge societal problem.

I have been lost more or less every time I've been in Gates. As an asian male CS student, nobody's ever "tried to help me."

Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?

That brings up another point: if she really was lost but no one took notice of and asked her, would she also think they're racist?

> give extra points on the SAT for just checking a box.

[citation needed]

Up until 2003, it really was this explicit:

The University of Michigan used a 150-point scale to rank applicants, with 100 points needed to guarantee admission. The University gave underrepresented ethnic groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, an automatic 20-point bonus towards their score, while a perfect SAT score was worth 12 points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

That got ruled unconstitutional, so now its implicit:

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...

http://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-d...

See graph of proportion admitted by SAT score.

Data is 1997, but if you think anything has changed, you're kidding yourself.

doesn't have to be explicit, look at the average scores required to get into a competitive university.

I don't think the way the poster worded it was particularly fair, but affirmative action is definitely a thing.

"Have you ever thought you might just look lost and people are trying to help out? Why do you immediately think everyone is somehow racist by asking you this question?"

Have you ever thought you might just have difficulty emphasizing and people are trying to tell you something valuable? Why do you immediately think anybody would "look lost" in general?

"It's because the classes are difficult. I took these classes when I went to school and if you don't really know your stuff, you will fail."

Right... Actually, this is where this ends with me. Mr Hauggis, you have definitely crossed the line.

"They were never treated any differently in class."

Do you really enjoy such confidence in your own ability to observe, feel and emphasize with people? Because from my experiences in the US, this sounds like a very strong claim.

>Why do you immediately think anybody would "look lost" in general?

Being in a new place, looking around at the architecture, etc. That seems a pretty reasonable explanation. Why the automatic assumption of racism?

Explain to us all how you somehow magically know that minorities weren't treated any differently in class, and in life.

Yeah, you don't. We know.

Explain to us all how you somehow magically know that she "hasn't put the work in".

Yeah, you don't. We know.

Your entire statement is bullshit designed to shrug off racism.

Just because some people are treated differently due to their skin colour doesn't automatically make this incident one of those situations.

Also, please don't engage in personal attacks.

Racism is a fact, it's not up for debate.

Nobody is denying. The question is rather whether this incident is racism, and there isn't really any evidence of that apart from speculation.

Why are you trying so hard to deny that people could be responding to her based on a stereotype?

Also, how do you know how your African-American classmates were treated?

I don't think the OP is denying that people "could" be responding to her based on a stereotype. I think it's more about giving people the benefit of the doubt rather than automatically assuming they are racist.

Unfortunately 'giving people the benefit of the doubt' is likely to perpetuate whatever bias exists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test

When I say "give the benefit of the doubt", I mean trust but verify, i.e. ask the person why they're asking if you are lost. Saying that we should just automatically assume bias is intellectual laziness and is just perpetuating the problem rather than solving it.

That seems unnecessarily aggressive to me, even though it could be meant in the best of intentions.

I can confirm it comes off as aggressive even when you try to apply a lot of touch since this is how I handle these things.

I find that a sometimes simple questions like this can turn into people calling me a SJW (then dismissing everything I ever say), "your the racist for accusing me of being racist", people thinking that I'm being mean to them, etc.

So the solution is to just automatically assume people are racists when they ask if you're lost? Nice.

Also, what exactly are you saying? I can't see how "no, why do you ask" said with a smiling face in a friendly tone could be construed as either aggressive or SJW, but then maybe I don't live somewhere where people are incredibly touchy.

You are acting as though 'being racist' is a massive crime that people need to be protected from even thinking that they might be complicit in.

The evidence shows that almost all of us, including members of minorities, are conditioned to have racial prejudice.

The reason this is a problem is that it systematically puts some people at a disadvantage based on their appearance, even though the evidence also shows that within group differences are greater than between group differences.

Unconscious bias can be overcome by making it conscious.

We are all racists. We can overcome the problem if we face it.

Trying to protect people from having to consider whether their actions arise from unconscious bias is actively working to perpetuate the problem.