Question about race and admissions

Newjack88
Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:57:27 +0000

Are you saying that Asians are the exception? That it is impossible to be too black, too Hispanic, or too white but it is possible to be too Asian?

You need to quit changing the context of the arguments you’re making. You were specifically talking about the college admissions process, so let’s make sure to limit it to that. You and I both know that there is a stereotypical Asian applicant, or, as you put it, an applicant that is “too Asian.” These Asians are considered to be “too Asian” because they overly identify with stereotypes about Asian students: they do math club, science club, etc. Likewise, if you were to say a student is “too Black” or “too Hispanic” you would be saying that they overly identify with African American or Hispanic stereotypes (not intelligent, gang members, high school drop outs, etc.), respectively. The stereotypical African American or Hispanic student would not be thinking about applying to college in the first place, so no, in regards to the college admissions process, there would not be a stereotypical Black or Hispanic applicant. The reason why there is no stereotypical Caucasian applicant is simply because they are arguably the most diverse applicant group in terms of socioeconomics, interests, etc. due to the group’s size.



And, how would that work? A student who lists math club as an extracurricular is automatically flagged into the “possibly Asian, beware” pile.

Colleges are committed to creating racially diverse student bodies, since it is in their best interest to do so. In a race-blind system colleges will simply use other methods, like looking at the applicant’s name, looking at their interests, place of birth, etc., to figure out the applicant’s ethnicity.



This would be true only if you assume that being part of an ethnicity means being intimately familiar with that ethnicity.

I would think that, more often than not, it is a pretty good assumption to make.



Attacking the personal character of Justice Powell, who was known among his peers as having excellent manners, does not further your argument one iota.

So because his peers said he had “excellent manners” (table manners? :P) he also has good character? Look up Bowers v. Hardwick.



The Seattle school district claimed not to be talking about racial balancing. And, look what happened to them.

Not a good point to make. You cannot compare going to a public high school to going to a college. The major difference being that you pay tuition to go to college, whether the college is public or private, whereas you pay for going to a specific high school entirely through taxes. Also, there are many more constraints that a school district has to deal with that a college does not. The school in this case was using race as a factor to determine where students ended up; thus, they actually trying to racially balance the student bodies. However, this is not even close to how race is used in regards to college admissions. I would be very surprised if this case were ever used as a precedent in a case related to college admissions.



Earlier you stated that, “there are more whites in every socioeconomic class…” From this, you claimed that “numerically, they make up most of the country’s poor/working class/lower middle class people.” You then argued that because of this, socioeconomic affirmative action would benefit whites and hurt Asians, who percentage-wise, are the wealthiest ethnic group. But, if there are more whites in every socioeconomic class, then numerically, whites make up most of the country’s wealthy people. Thus, under your reasoning, socioeconomic affirmative action would hurt whites.

I have already answered this. You are thinking “hurt” as in more of a certain group being rejected; I, however, mean hurt as in that certain group will see there representation at certain schools decreased. If you had read post #72, you would have seen that I specified what I meant by “hurt.”



In post 67, you stated that “Affirmative Action does not affect Whites.” Later on in post 72, you said, “i think that both system benefit whites.” These statements contradict each other.

There is no contradiction there. The current race-based Affirmative Action policy benefits Whites because it does not affect them. They are not the ones who see their representation reduced in the name of more racial diversity: Asians do. As for a socio-economic Affirmative Action policy, I have already said why I think that Whites would also benefit from that system.