- Mar 11, 2015
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Debunking another white racist false narrative.
End Affirmative Action for White People
African Americans deserve it. White Americans don’t.
Isvari
Jun 9·
Today, white people receive a heavy amount of affirmative action in college admissions. Not only are they playing the system and gaining from unfair practices, but they have successfully pitted Asians and other minorities against each other. It needs to stop.
Before I dive into a thousand words about the whole college admissions debate, I want to be clear about one thing: African Americans deserve affirmative action. This whole fiasco should never have had anything to do with Black people. Yet every time anyone talks about admission rates, the most vitriolic comments are about them, even though they are still the victims of a massive amount of societal injustice and systemic racism that is far higher than anything Asians — or anyone else — faces today.
So, as an Asian, I would never ask us to end affirmative action for the Black community (or the Hispanic and Native communities). In fact, seventy percent of Asian Americans support affirmative action. No, I am asking that we end affirmative action for whites.
What do I mean?
First, white people receive too much affirmative action in college admissions (and later, in workplaces).
I recently talked to a few Asian teenagers applying to college. I was saddened to hear they had been receiving the same advice I’d gotten from counselors over a decade ago: “It’s harder to get into good schools as an Asian. Just try for lower schools and whatever you do, don’t apply for STEM. As an Asian, you have to score higher and be involved in more extracurricular activities.”
Since I’d been to college, though, one thing has changed. Today, there are several proposed and filed lawsuits against the constitutionality of affirmative action, including one set to go to the Supreme Court. No one questions that race plays a role in Harvard’s admissions decisions and some Asians are saying that this bias has to go, even if it costs other minorities. This debate has taken the nation by storm.
I support affirmative action because everything is not about Asians. But the real story here is about whites. Take a look at the data. At Harvard, Asians have lower admit rates than their white counterparts by more than African Americans have a boost. (In other words, white people are receiving more affirmative action over Asians than African Americans are over them.)
It turns out, if you dig a little deeper, qualifications have nothing to do with it at all. A paper found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard fell under the categories of recruited athletes, legacy students, and children of faculty and staff.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w26316.pdf
That share also includes the “dean’s interest list,” which consists of applicants whose relatives made donations to the university. About 75% percent of those students would have been rejected on the strength of qualifications alone, which means about 32% of white students at Harvard are unqualified. Wow.
Later in life, white people will continue to get better jobs and success based on looks, networking, and family connections. While Black and Hispanic people will leave college and continue to face discrimination at jobs that do not care about equal statistics, for white people, the affirmative action never stops.
White people are the ones who control most college boards and teach most college classes. If white people face hardship (such as poverty), it is not because of their race.
