rayiner

No, you're conflating race, culture, and class. You're the one who said people from different races have different "ideas and abilities." And you're defending a DEI system that stereotypes people based on skin color. It's a system that treats people as proxies for their racial groups despite their individual circumstances. The affluent non-white kid from the suburbs is treated as somehow bringing the perspective of disadvantaged inner-city non-white kids. While the poor white kid from rural Oregon is grouped together with more affluent white kids and treated as "privileged."

> It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality.

Coordinated by who? The applicants who are applying to colleges? Because if not there's no justification for discriminating against them based on something someone else is doing.

> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.

Nobody did any such thing. You seem to be confused: Voting rights are individual rights. There’s not such thing as voting rights for “communities.”

> So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.

Your claim above was that minority school districts get less funding. But the headline result of the paper is that they don't, and haven't for decades. In fact, they specifically call out the "popular narrative" you repeated: "The findings are broadly consistent with recent academic work on patterns of school spending, which finds within-state progressivity (increasing since the mid-1990s) and usually modest national-level differences in spending by poverty and race (Tyner 2023; Corcoran et al. 2003; Corcoran and Evans 2015; Candelaria and Shores 2019). However, our findings are contrary to popular narratives that often assume that high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts have lower-than-average spending."

> Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance.

You also sound racist like Biden saying "poor kids can be just as smart as white kids." You're flipping back-and-forth between "low income underperforming" and "minority." Even if you're correct that society owes poor communities even more spending than rich ones, that doesn't justify your focus on race. There are low-income underperforming white school districts too, lots of them.

> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.

No such thing happened.

> So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods.

If someone is poor, why does it matter what historical circumstances caused that result? If two people inherit their grandmother's houses, and both houses are worth $100k, what difference does it make that one house is worth that much because of redlining and the other because of rust belt deindustrialization?

You keep circling back to economics to justify treating people differently based on race, and it makes no sense. If you want to help poor people, just do that directly.

> Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools.

False, and has been for decades: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Reber_S.... See page 27:

"This report documents nearly five decades of changes in school funding patterns across the United States... Districts with the highest non-white enrollment shares maintained higher spending throughout the entire period studied, although their advantage was smaller, and in some years reversed if spending is adjusted using CWIFT. Like high-poverty districts, districts with higher non-white shares also experienced disproportionate spending growth after the mid-1990s."

> Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.

Legacy admits have slightly academic scores than the average person admitted: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/upshot/ivy-league-legacy-...

Your premise (the premise behind DEI) that people of different races differ in "ideas and abilities" is like weird, old-timey racism. Nobody can ever explain to me what different "ideas and abilities" I bring to a team compared to a white person.

DEI isn’t about using race as a proxy for disadvantage. Universities went to the Supreme Court and told them that they can’t use lack of “wealth, education, and opportunity” instead of race, because what they wanted was more people with particular skin colors, not more people who were poor, etc. This is literally in Harvard’s brief in SFFA. See pp. 52-54: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/230739/202.... There’s nothing to call that other than racist, in the most widely understood sense of the term.

Was the racism committed by the other students?

What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?

You don’t really have to speculate about this. Universities literally went to the Supreme Court to protect their right to discriminate based on race. The disparities in this data are similar to the internal Harvard and UNC data that came out in the SFFA litigation.

No, DEI is straight-up racism. It's grouping people by their skin color and evaluating the groups differently. For example, for an applicant with a 3.2-3.4 GPA and an MCAT of 24-26, the medical school acceptance rate in 2013-2016 was 6% for Asians, 8% for whites, 31% for hispanics, and 56% for black applicants: https://www.aei.org/economics/new-chart-illustrates-graphica.... The people who support that are racists. The people who oppose that are the non-racists.

> Again, if you fit into Utah, it is probably a really nice place.

Yes, but I don't think skin color standing alone prevents you from "fitting into Utah." I think of people in Utah as being warmer and nicer than people in Astoria, Oregon, where my mother-in-law lives. My brother-in-law grew up in Astoria and he’s black presenting (more Samoan and asian but with the textured hair) and he fit in really well and was popular in school, despite having all white friends. When I go to Astoria, nobody is mean or racist, but my experience in Utah was definitely that people were warmer. (Note that Astoria is politically similar to Salt Lake County, that is blue leaning, but not liberal by any means.)

> he had big dreadlocks and I guess looked alternative

How does he know that it was because he was black and not because he "looked alternative?" I look like brown Ned Flanders and the only time I've ever gotten stares (in the US) is from other brown people in southern towns where I'm like the only other one. And I'm not oblivious to it--I'm certainly aware of the airport people in Japan following me around like a potential terrorist.

I trust your friend had the experience he had. But I also think it’s important to be precise about the standard you’re applying when you accuse places of being racist. If you assume people have an obligation to disregard differences not only in skin color, but how they express themselves or present their identity, then fine, but be explicit about that assumption. Because not everyone agrees that’s the standard.

> There are few, if any, race neutral approaches that can’t be gamed

The race-conscious approaches are heavily gamed too. The minority students at elite universities are rarely people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most often, they’re the children of affluent minorities, often elites from latin america or africa who have no connection to discrimination in the U.S.

Ironically, you’re engaged in some wild racial stereotyping by flipping back and forth between race and economic circumstances. Do you think there aren’t lots of affluent minorities in the U.S.? Harvard doesn’t let in poor minorities.

> the only motivation for such approaches is to satisfy those who are so fervently against the idea of affirmative action

Yes, institutions must satisfy those who are against grouping people together by race and treating them differently on that basis. That’s not only the law, but the law is correct.

> so it’s really just the stupid rich kids who benefit the most from “merit-based” admissions, not some humble, poor, but brilliant, child of the wrong race.

The evidence shows that the people who benefit the most from objective, merit-based admissions is smart lower-class kids of all races.

> There’s absolutely no shortage of educational opportunities.

That doesn’t justify grouping people based on race and treating them differently.

> I’m not sure why you’re arguing about Harvard. It impacts such a small percentage of the population.

Have you read any of the record in SFFA? Harvard just happened to be the headline name. Almost every institution does it. The medical school data I posted up thread is aggregated across all medical schools.

And elite institutions like Harvard are especially important because they’re gatekeepers. That’s how racial preferences jumped the air gap from universities to corporations. While universities had a carve out for affirmative action, employers never did. Race-conscious policies have always been illegal in the employment context (as the Supreme Court recently affirmed 9-0). But Ivy-educated people took those ideas from universities into the workplace and a bunch of Harvard-educated lawyers gave very bad advice.

> Am I “discriminating” against my child Peter when I give his brother Paul a cookie because his other brother Pedro stole Paul’s cookie at lunch

In this hypo, neither Paul nor Peter’s cookie was stolen. People aren’t reincarnations of their oppressed ancestors.

> Centuries of discrimination against whole populations (women, non-whites) and I'm supposed to get bent out of shape that a university is preferring to admit people of those discriminated groups?

Yes, not because you’re white, but because as a citizen you have a moral obligation to help ensure that our institutions treat citizens as individuals, not as “groups.” Individuals living today shouldn’t be treated as if they personally suffered that discrimination by grouping them together based on skin color with people in the past who did. That doesn’t mean ignoring the effects of past discrimination. But those effects are baked into people’s individual circumstances and can be evaluated in those terms. Rich people should be treated alike morally and poor people should be treated alike morally regardless of the individual path dependency that led them both to the same place.

You can’t have your group identity cake and eat it too. I can’t demand better treatment than a similarly situated white person because other Bangladeshis are poor. I’m not them any more than you are them. Conversely, it’s wrong to discriminate against my wife’s poor white extended family members because other white people are rich. My kids go to private school with WASPs, some of whom definitely have slave owner legacy money. My wife’s family aren’t those people, and it’s racism to arbitrarily group them together.

Why is a Bangladeshi not capable of empathizing with and articulating how a white person would feel under given circumstances?

> It’s not that “treating people differently based on skin color” was the worst thing, it was that using skin color as a basis for discrimination

Those are the same thing. "Discrimination" literally means "treating people differently based on skin color." Which is what the universities were doing.

> giving children who grew up in zip codes with terrible education outcomes a handicap during college admissions

That's not what universities were doing. We know that because they said so! In Harvard's brief to the Supreme Court, for example, Harvard argued that it had no "workable race-neutral alternative" that would achieve its goal of "diversity." Harvard.Br.52-53.

What you're describing--"giving children who grew up in zip code with terrible education outcomes a handicap"--is a race-neutral approach that focuses on socioeconomic factors. Harvard told the Supreme Court that such approaches would not work to achieve its goals: To achieve diversity targets without considering race, "Harvard would have to give socioeconomic tips of disproportionate magnitude ... so large that they would 'essentially automatically put[] in any applicant ... with an average probability of admission.'" Harvard.Br.53.

Your 85% white figure doesn’t tell you anything. Educated and liberal white people have an out-group preference, which is why universities and medical schools discriminate against white people despite being run by white people.

> For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky.

Are you speaking from experience? As a “brown guy with a beard,” Utah was like heaven compared to Maryland or New York. I’m so fucking sick of the mid-Atlantic “we’re not racist, we’re assholes to everybody” shtick.

What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.

The confusion is the point. People who want to have racial preferences in admissions and hiring can’t use the phrase “racial preferences,” because it’s always been unpopular. So they used the term “affirmative action” instead. But that also came to be understood as meaning racial preferences. So then they switched to “DEI.” Now they’re throwing that label under the bus too. I suspect within a few years we’ll have a different label.

He’s a carnival barker. That doesn’t change the fact that political appointments are political—they don’t have any relevance to merit-based admissions to universities or job hiring.

In fact, the distinction between political appointments and those other things is critical. In politics, you appoint people to reward your various constituencies. That’s just how politics works. But jobs and universities shouldn’t work that way.

It’s the same group of people running the companies and boards as are running Harvard and the medical schools.

> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.

If you believe this, go to where my mother in law lives in rural Oregon and spend a few months there among the people who weren't smart enough to go live somewhere else.

Nobody claims that political appointments are "merit based." They're by definition political. But university admissions and employment are supposed to be merit based, not political.

If I ever got famous, I would hope that people would remember me posthumously by what I did rather than by the fact that I was the "first Bangladeshi" to do whatever. You just mentioned two women professors at Yale and Caltech. I am sure they did amazing things. But your post just says they were women and contains no reference to their actual lives' work.

No we don’t. There’s an old case that everyone always takes out of context. Under modern american corporate law, directors and management have broad discretion to do what they think is in the best interests of the corporation, broadly defined.

"Mens rea" just means you have the mental state required for the crime. Negligence or recklessness are mental states, so they can satisfy the mens rea requirement if the crime is defined that way. For example, recklessness or gross negligence can satisfy the mens rea requirement for vehicular manslaughter.

But negligence is evaluated from the point of view of a reasonable person. Would a reasonable person foresee that telling an AI to do that could cause it to do illegal things? We'll likely have to develop that through case law as the facts develop.

You’re arguing against a strawman. Most divorce isn’t because one partner is abusive. That happens. But that’s not most of what’s happening. My wife is from a part of the country with a lot of lower income white folks, and I’ve made a lot of observations about divorce. It seems to me like much of it is people with poor impulse control making bad decisions and the lack of social structure to help guide those people to make better ones.

“Countervailing” not “counterfeiting.”

Do you have a source for that? Google Gemini says that’s true if you define “drug abuse” broadly to include things like alcohol. It’s well established, for example, that more affluent people drink more. But I suspect they are less likely to use meth or things that cause really negative outcomes.

There are good reasons for getting divorced. At the same time, a lot of divorce is just low impulse control people making bad decisions or lacking the social skills to be able to overcome difficult situations. And those people are generally not very good parents, divorce being a symptom of the underlying problem rather than a cause.

Those are all different phenomena that were eliminated over time for different reasons. There’s not an undifferentiated blob of “progress,” but rather social dynamics changing in response to context.

What people call “xenophobia” these days—which isn’t really xenophobia as properly understood—is just the flip side of ethnic affinity coin. If I come to America and declare that I’m a “proud south Asian” and indicate my affinity for my co-ethnics by joining various “south asian XXX associations,” then what reaction am I going to elicit from the people outside my ethnic group?

If you take a society that has been taught to abandon their own ethnic identity, and introduce into it foreigners with strong ethnic identity and in-group affinity of their own, you’re going to generate counterfeiting response. You can call it “xenophobia” or whatever you want, but the only way to overcome it is to strip subgroup identity altogether.

What is the proof that the “systemic context has changed?” Pointing to “state mechanisms” cuts both ways. Because in a democracy, the state mechanisms give newcomers power over those who are already here through the power of the state. The newcomers don’t even have to overwhelm you physically to change your way of life.