Picture this: somebody hits two live wires and is being electrocuted.
The sane response is to shut off the power as quickly as possible. (I am assuming a properly installed ground-fault interruptor hasn’t already done so.)
The “woke” response is to reverse the polarity of the wires.
What the Brahmandarin Caste considers “racial justice” in practice amounts to reverse racial discrimination in favor of ethnic minority group B, at the expense of ethnic minority group A that not only had no part in the past wrongs done to B by (mostly) group W, but wasn’t even present when these things were happening.
At many elite schools, they reached the conclusion that a purely merits-based admission policy, with the current pool of applicants, leads to a very high representation of East Asians in the student body. (Never mind that a heterogenous group with several very different cultures is being treated as one monolith: that hasn’t stopped Argentinians, Cubans, and Mexicans from being lumped together in the “Hispanic” or “LatinX” [barf] category.) So they started practicing “diversity” games that, in practice, make it even harder for an Asian to be admitted than for a WASP.
Now two lawsuits are before the US Supreme Court: one concerning University of North Carolina (a state university), the other concerning Harvard (which is private and has a bit more leeway). Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, has all the sordid details — not in the Volokh Conspiracy group blog where I first saw his work, but at NBC, no less.
“The main culprit for the disparity is that Harvard admissions officials give Asian applicants much lower “personal ratings” than students of other races, including whites, even though they on average outperform whites on more objective measures, such as grades and test scores. The personal ratings are based on highly subjective factors such as having a “positive personality,” likability and being “widely respected.””
Er, where have I heard this before? Oh yeah… prewar Harvard abandoning pure admissions testing in favor of a greater emphasis on “character” — code speak for “otherwise we have too many students of the Hebrew race”. Peter Jacobs in Business Insider:
[…] Notably, the lawsuit against Harvard argues that the Ivy League university “is using racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.” […]
University of California, Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel details this discrimination against Jewish students in his acclaimed book “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” In one chapter, Karabel highlights the controversial actions of A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president from 1909-1933, who very publically attempted to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to the university.
At one point, Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would “ruin the college” by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel’s book. Harvard would be ruined “not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body,” Lowell wrote in the letter.
The only way to prevent this, Lowell argued, was to impose strict quotas and restrictions. Ideally, Lowell wanted to cap Harvard’s Jewish population at 15% of the student body, according to Karabel. The size of the Jewish student body had quickly risen from 7% of freshmen in 1900 to 10% in 1909, 15% in 1915, 21.5% in 1922, and 27.6% in 1925.
[…]Here’s how Karabel sums up the new changes approved in 1926, which would effectively allow the Harvard administration to limit its Jewish student population:
The committee decisively rejected an admissions policy based on scholarship alone, stating that “it is neither feasible nor desirable to raise the standards of the College so high that none but brilliant scholars can enter” while stipulating that “the standards ought never to be so high for serious and ambitious students of average intelligence.”When the faculty formally approved the report eight days later, Lowell was further elated, for they also approved measures making the admissions process even more subjective. In particular, the faculty called on [Committee on Admissions chairman Henry Pennypacker] to interview as many applicants as possible to gather additional information on “character and fitness and the promise of the greatest usefulness in the future as a result of a Harvard education.” Henceforth, declared the faculty, a passport-sized photo would be “required as an essential part of the application for admissions.”
Elite colleges also began to use legacy admissions during this period — giving preference to children of alumni — in order to maintain a predominantly Protestant student body, Karabel explains.
These policies eventually died out in the 1950s, as World War II veterans began to enter college on the GI Bill, bringing with them a more serious outlook to their studies that re-emphasized academic rigor.
I am also reminded of the Jewish “numerus clausus” quotas for universities in Tsarist Russia, or interwar Hungary (even though the latter appears to have been lackadaisically enforced).
The chances SCOTUS will shoot this practice down are, sadly, slim, for reasons Prof. Somin lays out.
Reverse discrimination is galling enough. If on top of everything else, you are playing the “forgotten man” game by compensating one group for past discrimination by another group by penalizing a third group, — one that for the most part wasn’t even present in the US at the time of the discrimination, while earlier Asian immigrants were themselves subject to discrimination — it again showcases the utter moral hypocrisy and moral cynicism of the Brahmandarin Caste.
As the Talmud Interneti (order Tzviut, tractate Tartuffe, folio 1984a) puts it:[*]
“Ten measures of hypocrisy have been placed in the world. Nine reside in US academia.”
[*] Need I point out this is satire?
Spin, strangeness, and charm 