Whenever I want a clear-cut example of latter-day racial discrimination, I point to elite universities’ treatment of Asians. As far as I’m concerned, the evidence is overwhelming. The denials are not only motivated reasoning, but desperate motivated reasoning.
Still, this leaves me with a puzzle. Do I really think that elite admissions officers wake up in the morning and think, “God, I hate Asians”?
I’m not a mind-reader, but I seriously doubt that they do. Indeed, I bet that the vast majority of elite admissions officers never even consciously think, “I not overly fond of Asians.”
What then is the psychological mechanism of discrimination? It’s more like, “We’re treating Asian applicants well enough.” Along with, “If we just admitted students on merit, this school would be majority Asian. That’s excessive.”
What admissions officers feel for Asians is not hate, nor even antipathy. It’s exasperation. Exasperation at what? At Asians’ excessive success. “These Asians keep forcing me to choose between being inequitable and being unjust. Aargh!”
I suspect that elite university discrimination against Jews often fit the same mold. While there must have been some committed anti-Semites at the Ivies in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, they were probably outnumbered by admissions officers who were simply exasperated by Jewish students’ stellar performance. “These Jews keep forcing me to choose between being inequitable and being unjust. Aargh!”
Does this mean that admissions officers have no hate in their hearts at all? To repeat, I’m not a mind-reader. Still, I can easily believe that admissions officers all over the country often wake up in the morning and think, “God, I hate people who think I’m racist against Asians.”
The people who make you choose between being inequitable and being unjust are exasperating. The people who tell you you’re unjust are the devil incarnate.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Apr 14 2021 at 9:56am
I wouldn’t be so sure about the lack of racial animus. The MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones described one applicant as “Yet another textureless Korean math grind”. A couple of years later, she was exposed as having lied about her qualifications to get the job, and resigned, to move on to a new career as a college admissions coach.
As for elite school admissions policies, I have a hard time believing admissions staff are the real policy makers. Since most of elite universities’ value proposition lies in signaling and in the value of their network, they have to keep admitting unqualified but rich legacy students (who increase the future option value of the degree) and the children of rich donors or foreign potentates because that increases the value of the alumni network. Hard-striving Asian students who are not already connected into a high-value strata of society or a politically significant voting bloc do not.
Scott L
Apr 14 2021 at 11:07am
“Yet another” expresses exasperation; “One of the” would express animus.
MarkW
Apr 14 2021 at 11:58am
+1. I don’t think it was accidental that Harvard was reportedly keeping Asians out by systematically downgrading their personality scores. And these downgrades were being done by admissions personnel who’d never met the applicants, but — hey — you don’t need to actually meet them to know what <i>they’re</i> all like.
Tom West
Apr 18 2021 at 11:10pm
I think things get very confusing because while ostensibly we’re talking about academics, for elite universities what we we’re really talking about is admittance into the American aristocracy. (As a non-American, I’ve never quite understood why in the absence of a real aristocracy, Americans have oddly invented their own – those who attend an elite university.)
I contrast this with Canada, where I live. There are universities with very strong academic standing, and they naturally have a very high Asian student population, but because there’s no associated elevation to the elite (all you get is a good education), there’s not nearly the social pressure to have it reflect society as a whole.
As for the US, I think this is one of those cases where the the “cover story” has come home to bite the people who were finding it convenient cover. If you are selecting for the aristocracy, I think it does make sense that it reflect the population over which it effectively rules. At least in my mind it would far better to be transparent, admit you are choosing the ruling class and admit on that basis rather than trying to twist an increasing untenable pretext that this is about obtaining a university education.
(Note, this is all personal opinion. My (limited) experience with Ivy League students is that they had received a decent education comparable to better schools across the globe (and they all seemed very nice). However, it was the deference that I saw Americans give to students of those institutions that felt almost unreal and was mostly unrelated to the student. I swear you could substitute the hushed “You realize he’s a Baron” for “You realize he graduated from Princeton” with no change in tone.
Anyway, perhaps this has changed in the last 20 years, but given the desperation to get into elite schools (and the number of prestigious institutions that apparently only recruit from those schools) I get the impression it has not.
Julian
Apr 14 2021 at 12:36pm
Why is it inequitable that Asians—or Jews, for that matter—are overrepresented among the student body? So long as it’s on merit, then such overrepresentation strikes me as neither inequitable nor unjust (which are basically synonyms for anyone who’s not woke).
Mark Brophy
Apr 14 2021 at 6:42pm
College isn’t enjoyable with Asians because they go to the library on Thursday night when they should be drinking booze with the non-Asian students.
Mark Z
Apr 14 2021 at 7:28pm
And also on Friday and Saturday nights at my undergrad college’s library (but then I was there too, so I can’t criticize).
BC
Apr 14 2021 at 7:40pm
“While there must have been some committed anti-Semites at the Ivies in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, they were probably outnumbered by admissions officers who were simply exasperated by Jewish students’ stellar performance.”
Discriminating against Jews out of a sense that following a pure merit-based system would result in having too many Jews around or that Jews “would take over” the place is anti-Semitism. That’s classic old-style discrimination, not the modern expanded woke definition that sometimes seems to apply to everything. Similarly, when Steve Bannon worries that a pure merit system might result in too many Asian Silicon Valley CEOs, which would disrupt “civil society”, that is also classic, old-style discrimination. Both rise above mere exasperation at not achieving some equity target. Indeed, neither universities in the 20s-50s nor Steve Bannon were concerned about diversity nor equity. Today’s university discrimination against Asians may not be motivated by “hate”, which (traditionally) connotes emotional hostility, but it does take the same form as the anti-Semitic university policies of the past and the Bannon-style white nationalist sentiment of the present. All three reflect an underlying view that there is a point at which having too many minorities around becomes “excessive”.
BC
Apr 14 2021 at 8:06pm
Here is an old Volokh Conspiracy article citing many instances of “respectable” people, including Bill Clinton, expressing concern that merit admissions would result in too many Asians or Asian-dominated classrooms: [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/19/which-political-leader-expressed-concern-about-california-universities-filling-their-entire-freshman-classes-with-nothing-but-asian-americans/ ].
Michael S.
Apr 18 2021 at 5:44pm
+1
also, the result and the behavior and the justifications are *exactly* as in other places whose racism is not really in question. Like Germany when it still was antisemitic and Soviet Russia (which never stopped being antisemitic). This is well documented, but I can confirm from family experience
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 15 2021 at 7:28am
I guess you have discovered an example of systemic racism. It’s easy to get racist results with out anyone being racist.
Zeke5123
Apr 15 2021 at 3:11pm
Well I would argue that everyone is being racist. That is, Asians are judged differently due to ethnic background.
This is probably an untoward thing to say but the reality is that while we think of racism as the Nazis, Apartheid, or Jim Crow south (ie all racists are evil malignant monsters motivated by racial animus) many people can engage in racism without being those monsters (perhaps more the banality of evil).
These administrators don’t really have racial animus but are committing racist acts (which is different than acts that have a disparate racial outcome).
BC
Apr 15 2021 at 11:25pm
This is not merely systemic racism. It’s old-style intentional racism. Maybe, there is no emotional hostility in the hearts and minds of the admissions staff — no “hate” — but they are intentionally trying to reduce the number of Asians admitted.
KevinDC
Apr 16 2021 at 11:24am
I find this comment interesting, because it seems like there’s lots of equivocation when people use the term “racism” or “systemic racism” and the like – everyone is defining it differently from each other and people end up talking past each other for it.
That said, I don’t think the process Bryan is talking about is what is considered “systemic racism” in the current trendy and “woke” sense. To this group, “racism” is defined entirely by end results, not by the process applied. Professor Kendi spells this out repeatedly and explicitly in his book How To Be An Antiracist – any situation where each racial group doesn’t get identical results is, by his definition, racist. To Kendi, racism has nothing to do with deliberate racial discrimination – on the contrary, he says you may needs to engage in lots of deliberate racial discrimination in order to be sufficiently antiracist. But neither does it have anything to do with personal feelings of animosity, or of intentions to harm or benefit any particular racial group. All that matters is that the end results are identical for all groups. So by Kendi’s lights, what you describe as “systemic racism” against Asians would actually be a good example of morally laudable systemic antiracism.
We see a similar division of concepts with people who insist on the primacy of “equity” over “equality.” Traditionally, equality meant everyone played by the same rules, with nobody getting special favors. The goal was to make sure that processes were applied equally to everyone. If different rules are applied to different groups (such as Asians for college admissions, to reduce their admission rates), what would violate equality and would therefore be racist. But if the process was equally applied to everyone, and Asians ended up highly overrepresented in college admissions, that was fine. There’s nothing wrong with the result – they only sensible way to speak of “results” as racist was as a shorthand for saying those results came about from unequal treatment or process. Equity, on the other hand, is entirely results focused. According to this idea, you decide in advance what you think the results should be, and then you apply different rules to different groups, benefitting some and hampering others, in order to get the results you’ve already decided should occur. Equity is about unequal treatment to achieve equal results. Suffice it to say, I’m not sold on this idea.
Maniel
Apr 17 2021 at 7:39pm
“Equity, on the other hand, is entirely results focused.”
I like the above sentence and what follows because it assigns a clear definition to the term “equity.” At Harvard, for whatever reason, the admissions officers have decided to place a very-high value on “equity” (racial balance?). For this reason (speculating a little here), they take race into account, adding “points” as needed to achieve the balance they believe to be proper. One observation is that “results” in this case are visible to the general public in terms of admissions, not (to most of us) in terms of successful studies, career preparation, etc. Still, Harvard is clear about their goals and, as has been pointed out before, they are a private school, entitled to their own prejudices.
I think we, who tend to think in economic terms, could be a little more gracious in our interpretations. Again, I like the above quoted sentence because it encourages looking around a little. For example, in horse-racing, we enjoy close finishes. For this reason, in handicap races, horses carry different weights according to their track records. In wrestling and boxing, we assign weight classes to raise the probability of “fair” fights. In amateur golf, competitors carry handicaps to make for more interesting contests.
Taking our cue from those examples, suppose I wanted to bring racial balance to other competitive areas. I will select the National Basketball Association (NBA) where I have observed relatively few Asian-American players. My goal is to achieve “racial balance” in the NBA. Rather than engage in polemics or blame, or even to become the NBA “admissions officer,” I propose an economically inspired rule change to bring supply and demand into balance (price is used in the free market, but I digress). My rule change would be that during a game, a goal scored by an Asian American would be counted more than one scored by an “over-represented” player. To keep this simple, I would simply double the worth of any basket – 2 points for a foul shot, 6 for a shot beyond the arc, and 4 for all others.
Too cute! It gets better. If doubling is not enough to make Asian Americans more attractive to teams, we can move to tripling, and beyond. Remember, we are simply using our new rule to achieve “equity.” BTW, is it possible that my new rule would make a career in basketball more attractive to Asian-American athletes? Any questions?
KevinDC
Apr 18 2021 at 10:01am
I agree it is refreshingly clear. And it doesn’t come from me, this is how it’s explicitly defined by people who are actively seeking “equity” in that sense, such as this statement:
That is, if you advocate for “equity” in the modern social justice sense, you’ve already decided what the outcomes are supposed to be, and policy makers should tilt the rules for and against various groups or individuals in order to achieve the proper outcome. (I suppose these people read Harrison Bergeron as less of a cautionary tale and more of an inspirational blueprint.) This includes changing the rules to help or hamper people on the basis of their race – Kendi, too, is refreshingly clear and unambiguous about that. In his book, he openly declares that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” The only thing that makes it racist or not, in Kendi’s view, is the results. As he says: “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”
Ergo, according to this view, if everyone playing by the same rules means Asians end up disproportionally successful economically or academically, then you need to implement policies which racially discriminate against Asians. Refusing to racially discriminate against Asians would itself be racist. Or so Kendi and modern social justice equity movement would contend.
John P Palmer
Apr 15 2021 at 11:04am
In the late 1970s, I objected to the admissions policy at my school, limiting the number of “foreign” students to only 4% of all admissions. I pointed out that admitting more foreign students would allow the university to earn more revenues (int’l fees were much higher) and that there was good evidence that many good students were being rejected.
The Registrar’s response was something like, “Good grief, man, if we admitted only the most qualified students, we’d be overrun by students from Singapore and Hong Kong.
David Seltzer
Apr 15 2021 at 10:59pm
John, well said. The cost of discrimination was the foregone revenue.
Billy Kaubashine
Apr 15 2021 at 12:25pm
It’s a classic “ends justify the means” dilemma. Diversity has been elevated to the status of a religion — something to be taken on faith and pursued at any cost.
There was a time when zealots stood in the schoolhouse doors and argued – and believed – that Homogeneity was an unequivocal good to be achieved by any means necessary. Today, the new woke zealots say the same of Diversity.
Neither forced Homogeneity nor forced Diversity is desirable.
David Seltzer
Apr 15 2021 at 11:09pm
In the summer of my senior year at Indiana University, 1970, I went to Cambridge to see a friend. He is Jewish. I indicated I would apply to Harvard Business School. He said, “I’ve heard Harvard admissions officials say there is an over representation of Jews in academia.” I applied to the University of Chicago instead and was accepted. When I told the Dean of the business school, he said he’d heard it before. It seems past is prologue.
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