Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

White supremacy is terrorism.

No one could have predicted…

This really is a full service blog.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

After roe, women are no longer free.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Commentary / Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell / In Which Reconstruction Ends For The Second Time

In Which Reconstruction Ends For The Second Time

by | 349 Comments

This post is in: , ,

This wasn’t unexpected, but it’s still a gut-punch:

The US Supreme Court on Thursday banned the consideration of race in college admissions, overruling nearly half a century of precedents and deprivingmany universities of a tool they say is essential for keeping their campuses diverse.

Elements of the until-today model of holistic admissions have a very checkered past.  “Whole-man”* approaches were developed in part to deal with the influx of Jews into the Ivys–it seems Jewish boys had the temerity to actually study and prepare for entrance exams, which meant that some other way had to be found to keep admitting the then-proper population.

But that system evolved as higher education became a mass phenomenon after the Second World War, and there are now all kinds of attributes that may be considered on admission, from skill in violin performance to the ability to keep another giant human from flattening your QB–and, until yesterday, as an element in the mix, the racial background of an applicant.

This decision was 6-3, with the usual and corrupt suspects forming the majority.  That means that every witless fucker who couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary shares the blame here.

I am too frustrated and heartsick to dive deep here, so I’ll just say that this is straight-up white supremacy in action.

In Which Reconstruction Ends For The Second Time

The ongoing effort to ensure that minorities in the US never get full access to the resources of elite society just got another boost.  Yes, it will mean that our a society as a whole will be at least a bit poorer and less capable.  But never mind:  higher ed is a little bit more welcoming today than it was yesterday for that vital underserved population:  elites w. access to SAT mills and unpaid internships.

ETA: As valued commenter Rikyrah says below, Michael Herriot cuts to the nub of this decision:

In Which Reconstruction Ends For The Second Time 1

I’d like to see the lawsuit that challenges those preferences.  Hah! Sometimes I crack myself up (through tears).

*It was all men then in the Ivy League.

Image: John Hesselius, Charles Calvert and his Slave,  1761

Reader Interactions

349Comments

  1. 1.

    Yutsano

    We knew it was going to happen, but it still hurts. I wonder if instead of AA colleges can weight applicants by ZIP code. I remember something like that being done once before.

    EDIT:  FRIST!

  3. 3.

    Tom Levenson

    @Yutsano: CA does that, I believe; and there are attempts to use other proxies, but none of them maintain minority representation at top tier institutions at the levels possible under the until-this-morning system.

  6. 6.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Yutsano: There are a lot of way that universities can sidestep this, but the Court made it harder and made the US a less fair place.

  8. 8.

    rikyrah

    Fast Talking Dyson Ain’t Wrong:

     

    Michael Eric Dyson (@MichaelEDyson) tweeted at 10:14 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    This is the face of a man who climbed the ladder of affirmative action to his present perch of power only to help destroy the very ladder on which he ascended. This is not only the mark of deep ingratitude & disavowal of history, but a withering betrayal of justice & democracy. https://t.co/qtoLiOlQuy
    (https://twitter.com/MichaelEDyson/status/1674436263972093954?t=8NWyyyQd_XxG2sDCz-IvZA&s=03)

  10. 10.

    AM in NC

    Interesting local effect of these cases: the Asian population in our area swung frighteningly GOP in the last cycle because they did not like Democrats supporting affirmative action at UNC, as they see it as penalizing Asian students.

  11. 11.

    Omnes Omnibus

    From Sotemayor’s dissent:

    Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back dec-
    ades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that
    race can no longer be used in a limited way in college ad-
    missions to achieve such critical benefits. In so holding, the
    Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a con-
    stitutional principle in an endemically segregated society
    where race has always mattered and continues to matter.
    The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal
    protection by further entrenching racial inequality in edu-
    cation, the very foundation of our democratic government
    and pluralistic society. Because the Court’s opinion is not
    grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equal-
    ity embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.

  13. 13.

    Tom Levenson

    @Baud: Not likely (at least in my lifetime), in my view, as the people that benefit from elite status markers will continue to use these institutions as part of the signaling game.

    I say this as someone who has both benefitted from my access to such markers and has seen them operate within elite higher ed. It’s true that MIT is much less burdened by some of the bullshit that the Ivys and equivalents are heir to–no legacies, for one thing.  But we aren’t immune.

  16. 16.

    Dangerman

    Two steps forward, one step back. Sure, today sucks; they can win a battle, but they have lost the war.

  17. 17.

    mrmoshpotato

    That means that every witless fucker who couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary shares the blame here.

    Say it loud!  Say it proud!

  18. 18.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Yale was founded on the blood money from the East India Company. So it shouldn’t have been prestigious in the first place.

    As someone said this is all the result of the whitelash of the Obama presidency.

  20. 20.

    Burnspbesq

    Smart admissions offices have been planning for this for a while. If an institution really cares about having a diverse student body, it will have one. It just has to be subtle about it.

  28. 28.

    Nelle

    @rikyrah: I will always remember the woman who accused me of trying to manipulate her when I asked her about the Supreme Court when she was saying that her family was all for Bernie.  In October of 2016.  I’m still and again infuriated.

  29. 29.

    gvg

    I don’t think it is going to impact Florida as much. We saw this coming a decade ago. First we have almost no legacy admissions and haven’t for a long long time. those got pushed out by how competitive it was to get in and the bad feelings and I think lawsuits over it.

    We went to some hybrid of income diversity modeling and a bunch of other things, essays and community service etc. The academic standards are very high even among the minorities that we do recruit, but there are enough intangible factors that are openly listed as criteria so that I don’t think you can challenge our decisions. It hasn’t been simply race based in a long time. For that matter, we think we need diverse whites, not just rich ones, and make sure we get them. There are still a lot of well off white kids because having a secure background is good for school work, but they are meeting a lot of different people. Our administration flat out said more than a decade ago that they had to do this.

    I hope they planned as well as they said. I hope other schools did too. But there were lawsuits and losses before this and I honestly thought this had already been lost 10 years ago. UF acted like it had been and made big changes then. Maybe it was just a state loss?

    It’s not easy. I bet it helps if the school has good finances. If plans don’t work and targets aren’t met you have to change and try another approach again. The economy affects you more. It would help to win more elections for sure.

    Don’t give up.

  30. 30.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Everyone should read Jackson’s dissent.  Here is the opinion.  Her dissent starts at page 211.  Her concluding paragraph:

    The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion
    that racial diversity in higher education is only worth po-
    tentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare
    Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities
    for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly
    awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority
    opts to ignore).106 It would be deeply unfortunate if the
    Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse,
    ahistorical, and counterproductive outcome. To impose this
    result in that Clause’s name when it requires no such thing,
    and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the
    full realization of the Clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy
    for us all.

  31. 31.

    jonas

    @AM in NC: This is happening in CA as well — Republicans are making hay of Dem lawmakers’ efforts to boost Black and Hispanic representation at the flagship UCs in particular by claiming it’s coming at the expense of harder-working Asian and South Asian students.

  32. 32.

    RaflW

    Very off topic, but yet another ‘random’ fall in Putin’s very accident-prone Russia: “Kristina Baikova, 28, an executive at Loko-Bank, is just the latest mysterious casualty involving Russia’s top business people. Ms Baikova allegedly fell from her 11th floor apartment on the Khodynsky Boulevard in the early hours of last Friday. She died instantly at the scene.”

  33. 33.

    randy khan

    I think the point that affirmative action continues to be available for people on the basis of anything but race is pretty critical, but frankly my expectation is that the first thing the elite schools will do in response is to get rid of the “objective” criterion of test scores and have much more subjective admission criteria that are effectively unchallengeable.  There is plenty of evidence that standardized tests have biases and can be gamed by people with greater resources, etc., and so if you can’t do something specific to counteract that thumb on the scale the best solution is to get rid of it.  There’s already a bit of a trendlet in that direction, so I won’t be surprised at all to see it increase.

    (Naturally, in red states you will have legislatures intervening to prevent state schools from doing that and requiring them to base admissions on test scores, at least in part, although politics of top-tier state university admissions are pretty complicated, as every town want to be able to get kids into those schools.)

  34. 34.

    Suzanne

    @Steeplejack:

    Now eagerly awaiting the logical next step—banning legacy admissions. 

    And deny America’s failsons their birthright atop us all?! Heresy.

  35. 35.

    Jackie

    O/T

    For those interested, today Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House (4 p.m. ET) has an exclusive  interview with President Biden. I believe this is his first one-on-one interview since he took office (outside of the Super Bowl interviews – which are pre-recorded.)

    It should be good!

  36. 36.

    Tom Levenson

    @randy khan: I am not sure that will happen. MIT just resumed using test scores. One reason: it’s a lot easier for MIT-math-capable minority kids to demonstrate their abilities on standardized tests than to gain access to elite math academies or fancy internships, and after doing a deep data dive (MIT, after all) the admissions people found that the tests helped them ID kids who would thrive here who might not have made it through other filters.

  37. 37.

    RaflW

    @randy khan: Previous thread there was a comment linking to @AshaRangappa_ saying that the ruling actually gives good space for colleges to consider race as it individually impacts a student and they can use that in their admissions application essays.

    I think it’s at least fairly well accepted that SATs/ACTs etc are a pretty shitty proxy for what makes a good student. I think getting rid of the “T/F: yacht is to regatta as tenement is to slum” multiple choice testing is more than welcome.

  38. 38.

    H.E.Wolf

    “Don’t mourn: organize.” One of the many things we can do is to get out the Democratic vote in every election, in order to enact better policies where we can.

    Leave the malevolent ostriches in the dustbin of history (now there’s an image). And be active allies in the centuries-long fight for equity.

  39. 39.

    Will

    A lot of people in the local Indian community were very happy with this decision… but y’know… white people.

  40. 40.

    louc

    @rikyrah: Except that the vast majority of sports teams at elite college campuses are comprised of sports like lacrosse and swimming and sailboating. You know, white people sports. (See: Varsity Blues)

  41. 41.

    jonas

    Using socio-economic information or ZIP codes as a proxy for race is one workaround to this, but is not nearly as effective. It’s essentially what CA did when affirmative action was ended in UC admissions: Asian enrollments shot up; White enrollments stayed about the same; Latinos dipped some, but Black enrollments, which weren’t all that big to begin with, absolutely cratered. I think at one point you could count the Black (American-born) men in the entering class (which numbered several thousand) at UCLA on two hands.

  43. 43.

    Steeplejack

    @rikyrah:

    I always get put off by Glaude’s “preaching from the pulpit” tone on Morning Joe. It must be torture to take a class with him.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    @Tom Levenson:

    I think the main thing California does is to guarantee UC admission to the top N% of the class at each school in the state.  That does a lot to help poor and underserved students without an explicit racial component, and I believe that kind of admissions policy has been upheld in the past.  Of course this Supreme Court seems completely untroubled by precedent, so it’s anyone’s guess if being previously upheld would mean anything if it were challenged today.

  50. 50.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @louc: Football, basketball, baseball, track and the other “mainstream” sports exist at the fancy schools too.

  52. 52.

    rikyrah

    colorfullstory (@colorfullstory) tweeted at 10:13 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    So many people are about to learn about systemic oppression. they claimed it was the boogie man and a figment of their imagination. White Women thought they were screwed when Roe v Wade was overturned. Just wait til the ramifications of Affirmative Action being overturned hits. https://t.co/dkJdJ7cjCQ
    (https://twitter.com/colorfullstory/status/1674435952884817921?t=wAR6Q9NmER7ZURAQY6QL_w&s=03)

    ReplyForward

  54. 54.

    Bupalos

    I’m cringing thinking about reading the majority’s reasoning on the military carve-out. I mean, Jackson hits it pretty hard there, and I can’t imagine how you talk around the bottom line there.

  59. 59.

    jonas

    @Tom Levenson: Dropping standardized test requirements is a double-edged sword. Yes, they often favored students whose families could afford expensive tutoring and coaching, but they were also one of the few ways kids who, say, didn’t really flourish in a traditional grade-based classroom, could nonetheless demonstrate that they had real talent in math or reading or other subject. My most recent high school grad barely passed senior English (said it was “stupid” and “boring”), but got nearly the highest possible score on the Regents exam.  Without that, all there is a report card that may or may not reflect their true abilities and passions.

  60. 60.

    Cacti

    2016 Bernie brats who said “give me a reason besides the Supreme Court to vote for her” today belongs to you.

    Wear your political legacy with pride.

  62. 62.

    rikyrah

    Leaundra Ross  (@LeaundraRoss) tweeted at 10:11 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    THIS is why we tell y’all asses to vote.

    The fringe part of the Supreme Court is going to keep going after shit.

    Hillary told y’all the court was going to come into play if we didn’t vote.

    You need to vote locally and nationally.

    Voting is for the rest of your life. https://t.co/nGoWiZDv1O
    (https://twitter.com/LeaundraRoss/status/1674435328118063105?t=TQ7i32w0ER_e4xz9SVyOhA&s=03)

  64. 64.

    Roger Moore

    @louc:

    Except that the vast majority of sports teams at elite college campuses are comprised of sports like lacrosse and swimming and sailboating. You know, white people sports.

    Yes, and those sports tend to be subsidized by the big money from football and basketball, which are much browner.  It’s one more way White people are able to profit at BIPOC people’s expense.

  66. 66.

    rikyrah

    Justice for Justin  (@ish_not) tweeted at 9:19 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    The 53% have hurt themselves AGAIN today…Roe…Affirmative Action …

    Phew! Ya’ll just gonna keep voting yourselves right back into just being in the kitchen, making babies, and having your husband, father, or brother have to sign for you to get credit or a bank account. https://t.co/GrBPo0EDhR
    (https://twitter.com/ish_not/status/1674422359913279494?t=sTJrmgjVe5wZ6KpDQQ4YFQ&s=03)

  67. 67.

    Will

    I love Balloon Juice. Great commentary that also serves as a warning time to time about the blinders on the left. We are losing minorities over this issue. Asian and Indian Americans don’t care about African Americans and they don’t want their kids missing out because the Democrats are trying to get one more African American male into college. They are some of our fastest growing minorities and their ties back to India and China will play a big part in our next one hundred years. Our politics currently treats every minority as if they are in the same boat.. You a minority?!? You have to vote Democrat!! Why? Because that’s what minorities do cause you all are a monolithic voting bloc that we demand know their place! This message is going to be damaging to Democrats over time.

  68. 68.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @James E Powell:

    Yes, but don’t forget the “No Difference!” Naderites of 2000.

    Yup. Roberts didn’t need the trumpy three to gut the VRA, and if RBG had retired in ’14, he’d most likely still have a five-four majority that included Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh

  69. 69.

    rikyrah

    Leaundra Ross  (@LeaundraRoss) tweeted at 9:21 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    I know y’all want to use Affirmative Action as the big boogeyman against Black people but a lot more women benefited from it.

    So I want to see someone bring a court case against legacy students.

    Because y’all can act brand new but that was the first Affirmative Action https://t.co/cW9JovfKIi
    (https://twitter.com/LeaundraRoss/status/1674422968557113346?t=zhwJNcNuZPZAfgFa47l0uA&s=03)

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jonas: Isn’t that why a lot of schools have made the tests optional?  If you did well, include them because they have some merit.  If you didn’t, leave them out and rely on the rest of your qualifications.

  72. 72.

    Argiope

    Hi Jackals–I have an admissions committee meeting this afternoon and my institution is a small private healthcare education one that has not formally prepared much for this ruling AFAICT. We need a workaround.  Questions for anyone who might be in the know: 1) Can we use ethnicity instead of race on our forms and still comply with this ruling? They are not the same thing, but is the ruling so tight that we’re just asking to be sued if we try it? 2) What other workarounds might be subtle enough to pass SCOTUS muster? How about adding more points for an essay where students tell us how they could provide culturally congruent care to underserved populations?

    We give a few extra points for BIPOC applicants on the admission scoring sheet; other points come from a lot of different places (work experience, GPA, other experiences, etc). But using non-White race did help us improve our student body diversity and I hate that we can’t keep doing it.  Importantly, we need more BILPOC clinicians in this country to improve racial health equity, which is currently dismal.

  73. 73.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: What particularly burns me are those among these same people who then attack Biden for not somehow stopping the Supreme Court from doing these things. What is he supposed to do, send ninja assassins?

  75. 75.

    Lyrebird

    @Yutsano: colleges can weight applicants by ZIP code.

    Some of them already do.  I agree with many commenters that some schools are gonna make creative moves against this, and I  think the elite ones with money will be right there, BUT:

    there are tons of students aiming for middle or lower-tier colleges who will suffer

    everything Justices Sotomayor and Jackson just said… sickening to have Equal Protection perverted to support white supremacy and embolden them

    whoever da phk said this was just about melanin should be sent back to law school, or maybe high school…

  76. 76.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Will: Yeah, fuck the people who have suffered generational oppression and systematic discrimination.  Right?

  78. 78.

    moonbat

    This is definitely NOT good and you can hear the echoes of all those tea bag racists claiming Obama NEVER would have made it into Harvard if not for affirmative action and was therefore “not that smart” in the ruling.

    BUT a couple of rays of hope in this muck of white resentment the under-qualified majority on the SC are trying to plunge us all into. The university system has been moving toward institutionalizing affirmative action for a good while. Sort of hard to unring the bell. The SC is trying to turn back the clock to the 50s but there are precious few universities out there who want to be seen as out and proud racists in this day and age, namely because the young people looking to choose a place to go to university are NOT into that AND the pool of young people entering college these days is shrinking.

    Two cents from a university denizen who has been hearing for years how the demographic shift is going to require ALL universities to become more competitive for students. ALL students.

  79. 79.

    Cacti

    In the current SCOTUS the right has their dream. A small group of unelected, unaccountable reactionaries to give them all the political wins they could never achieve at the ballot box.

  80. 80.

    New Deal democrat

    This Supreme Court believes in originalism. Except for the Civil War Amendments (see, e.g., Freedman’s Bureau).

    serious question: what do Historically Black Colleges and Universities do now? Close up shop?

  81. 81.

    Josie

    @Argiope: ​
     I don’t know if it would produced racially balanced classes, but seeking to encourage students who are the first of their families to attend college would be beneficial in many ways.

  83. 83.

    Bupalos

    I think chief among the reasons they did this is that it’s going to be politically popular and benefit the Party. It can put some white and Asian (and in my experience higher status immigrants) suburbanites back onsides in the class division between parties.

    We really need to do a better job at a lower level highlighting how equality and diversity benefit us all. I’m afraid the way the conversation happens on so many things is in a framework of retributive justice and sacrifice.

  85. 85.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Tom Levenson: @jonas: Test scores remain by far the most objective criterion. They can  be gamed to a far lesser extent than extra-curricular activities can. Also wealthy parents have access to better schools so they have a leg up even without the test scores.

    Also test scores are one way to judge applicants across the globe.

  86. 86.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Will: Where I live, I see Republicans trying real hard to convince Indian-Americans that it’s a zero-sum game between them and Black/Hispanic people, and they should vote Republican if the Democrats won’t throw the others under the bus. I don’t see a huge amount of evidence that it’s working, at least locally.

  87. 87.

    Cacti

    @Matt McIrvin: He put absolutely no weight behind SCOTUS reform. He appointed a commission of academics to have a circle jerk about court expansion, they made no recommendations, and it was swept under the rug and never discussed again.

  88. 88.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Yale was founded on the blood money from the East India Company.

    I hear you, but what institution founded in that era didn’t in some fairly direct manner profit from blood money? What does Yale do today about their past and how it informs their policies that affect their future actions?
    https://news.yale.edu/2021/11/01/yale-publicly-confronts-historical-involvement-slavery

    I’d say they’re very late to address this, especially compared to peer institutions (e.g., Brown), but this seems like a decent start. Possibly others on this forum have more insight on Yale’s history and current policies and actions.

  89. 89.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Cacti: Court expansion would require legislative action and there is no conceivable world in which it would have happened quickly enough to prevent these rulings from happening.

  90. 90.

    Cacti

    @New Deal democrat: HBCUs have never refused admission to white students. White women could get law and medical degrees from them when the fancy white schools were an all boys club.

  91. 91.

    Will

    @Omnes Omnibus: Honestly, most Asians and Indians could care less about the suffered generational discrimination. A lot of Chinese Americans will point out America had no problem killing them to build the American West.

    I married into a large Indian family. I learned early on I was the only allowed BMW in the family. Wife finally explained to me after a few years that it’s common for Indian parents to ban BMWs for their kids. That means No Blacks, No Muslims, No Whites.

    This decision was a win in their communities or at least that is how they feel. When they hear that this is a racist decision from Democrats, we only push them ever so slowly away from the D camp.

  92. 92.

    The Moar You Know

    In California this will lead to our state universities going from 80% Asian to 100% Asian.

    Be careful for what you vote for.

  94. 94.

    Tom Levenson

    @Omnes Omnibus: Also, this is a classic example of divide and conquer. Who is keeping East and South Asian kids out of elite colleges? The still below-population-proportion underrepresented minority population? Or white folks?

    See, e.g., the demographics of the state of North Carolina, and those of UNC Chapel Hill.

    People of Asian background are already over represented based on population. Those of Black and Hispanic background wildly underrepresented on a population basis. White people are somewhat over representated.

    To argue that this is about ability vs. opportunity and a fair playing field in k-12 education is…to be wrong.

  95. 95.

    Tom Levenson

    @Bupalos: I agree. There’s plenty of data on the pragmatic value of diversity.

    But it’s a wicked communication problem.

  96. 96.

    rikyrah

    @Will:

    They wouldn’t have ever been allowed into this country without the changes in immigration brought on by the Civil Rights Movement.

     

    And, all the ‘ opportunities’ provided to them were done so because of the Civil Rights Movement.

  97. 97.

    lee

    Texas already has the top 10% automatically accepted into any state university except for the 2 flagships (UT and Texas A&M). UT is now around 6% and A&M just recently dropped it to …. 8%(?).

    Both programs also have ‘system admits’. If you attend a system school take the right courses and get above a 3.5 then you are automatically enrolled your sophomore year at the flagship. There are a lot of system schools that are in south Texas.

    They (A&M and UT) both claim that legacy admissions have ended but everyone knows that is 100% bullshit.

  100. 100.

    James E Powell

    I wonder if any of the analysis or pundits in the political press will call this decision what it is: a declaration of white supremacy by the justices of the political party that has white supremacy as its core ideology.

  101. 101.

    Will

    @rikyrah: Really? So there weren’t Indians or Chinese in America seeking opportunity before the Civil Rights movement? Come on. You want to say the Civil Rights movement made their life better, then that is true. To say they are only in this country because of the Civil Rights movement is to say something not true.

  102. 102.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @rikyrah: This! (as well as This! for all the other tweets you quoted).

    @Roger Moore:

    I think the main thing California does is to guarantee UC admission to the top N% of the class at each school in the state.

    That policy actually goes back six decades, long before the whitelash against affirmative action, and it’s one of the major distinctions between the University of California system and the Cal State University system (the top 9% and 33% respectively their high school are automatically eligible, IIRC). However, eligibility do not mean they’ll actually be admitted.

    The problem is that there are far too few UC schools to accommodate all the students who qualify — and especially at the “elite” schools with the UC system, e.g. UCLA and UC Berkeley.

    So UC admissions do have to winnow the applicant even further. Since collect affirmative action was banned CA in 1996 and UCs (and some of the most popular CSUs) have tried to find other ways to achieve classes with “excellence and diversity” with a mix record of success.

    FWIW, I’ll note that at least at UC Berkeley, Asians are far over-represented compared to their percentage of the state population, and there’s still some Asian parents complaining that their child was the victim of affirmative action for not getting in.

  104. 104.

    Cacti

    Biden the dedicated institutionalist stated that SCOTUS “is not a rogue court” as the Republican 6 continue to repeal the 20th century by judicial fiat.

    Heaven forbid he say something impolite about them.

  105. 105.

    trollhattan

    @Tom Levenson: Have to agree–the value of esp. Ivy “branding” if you will, is not impacted in the least. My kid’s best HS buddy is at Yale and her experiences there are vastly different from those of herself of her other friends currently in college. She’ll graduate with a network that includes kids of literal billionaires, kids of TV and film celebrities, kids who are on TV shows now.

    CSU Stanislaus it ain’t.

  106. 106.

    jonas

    @The Moar You Know: Affirmative action was ended in the UC/Cal State system nearly 30 years ago, so it doesn’t really affect them. Elite private schools, like Stanford or the Claremont Colleges, OTOH, are no doubt going to have to adapt their admissions policies for next year.

  108. 108.

    Tony Jay

    @Will:

    Pardon me for asking what is obviously a silly question, but how does cutting the negroes loose in order to pander to these racist Indian and Chinese people you’re speaking for help get more Democrats elected?

    Oh, two questions. What other policies would the Democratic Party have to ditch to make themselves more attractive to these racist Indian and Chinese people than the Republican Party?

    Sorry, three questions. How would the United States benefit from the Democrats joining the Republicans in the crab barrel of racist pandering?

  109. 109.

    Mike in NC

    Excerpts from a new book by Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who in 2018 wrote a harsh New York Times Op-Ed about Trump under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” are starting to trickle out. The latest claim from Taylor? Trump was a misogynistic pig throughout his tenure in the White House, and some of his most shocking comments came at the expense of his own daughter.

    Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, describes several incidents that made women in the Trump administration uncomfortable in his upcoming book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump.

    I have no intention to ever pay to read a book by any lowlife who willingly worked for Fat Bastard.

  111. 111.

    Cacti

    @trollhattan: This. You don’t go to those schools because they teach anything different than you’ll find at a large public university.

    You go for the name, the connections, and the alumni network

  113. 113.

    Another Scott

    Thanks for this, Tom, and everyone.

    Yet another reason to be determined to vote the monsters out, pass the new Voting Rights Act, fix these recent travesties by the SCOTUS with new legislation, increase support for education, and Fight for 15 (from May 2021):

    Tonja Jacobi: Well, there’s no magic number that they have to be panels of five. 15 was the proposal that we put forward because five is a pretty manageable number to have on a panel and three panels make sense and you could more than triple the workload of the court because by having five judges on a panel rather than nine on a panel, more could get done. If you’ve listened to oral argument at the Supreme Court with nine justices all trying to get a word in edgewise, well usually eight because Justice Thomas doesn’t normally speak except under the strange rules of the pandemic.

    You can get more done if there are less justices on a panel so we proposed having three panels of five. But you could have different numbers. The point is that the justices could be doing more rather than having just, you know, one panel of nine where every justice hears every case but there aren’t many cases. The justices are only hearing about 70-75 cases a term. That’s not a lot whereas if you look at the circuit cases and then certainly look at other courts like state courts. judges are hearing a lot more and they’re doing a lot more work. There’s no reason that the Supreme Court justices couldn’t be doing a lot more work and overseeing the federal judiciary much more effectively.

    There are a huge number of important issues that the Supreme Court is not addressing because they’re just not taking enough cases. And if we put them in a position where they’re both capable of doing more and perhaps being forced to do a little bit more, they could actually be making more important law for the country and actually doing more work for the country as well. And so this is an opportunity not simply to change the partisan balance but actually institute reform and make the court actually decide more issues.

    There are many important issues that are going unaddressed by the Supreme Court at the moment that really need to be addressed and I am happy to share some examples with you but the important point is, I mean, 70 cases among nine justices. Each judge is only writing about seven or eight majority opinions a year and they each have four clerks to essentially ghostwrite those seven or eight opinions. I mean it’s a very cushy job, shall we say.

    More at the link.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  114. 114.

    Ksmiami

    Lawless, corrupt, entitled- this Court is out of control and needs either restructuring or destruction. It’s an obstacle to America realizing its promise.

  115. 115.

    jonas

    @Mike in NC: One thing I’ve noticed about the Biden administration is a distinct lack of disaffected staffers and cabinet members resigning in disgust and then penning tell-all memoirs about what a deranged idiot their boss was.

    Funny that.

  116. 116.

    Eolirin

    @Will: The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese immigration into this country, and its effects were not fully overturned until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, so very literally, the vast majority Chinese Americans are either immigrants because of, or descendants of people that were only able to come to this country because of the Civil Rights Movement.

  117. 117.

    Cacti

    @Will: Congrats on being “One of the good ones”.

    Do you let them pat your head and call you a good boy?

    Do they give you treats?

    Seriously though, sorry about the painfully obvious case of Stockholm syndrome you’ve developed for your racist in-laws. You should see someone about that.

  118. 118.

    trollhattan

    @Mike in NC: Has Perlstein indicated whether he’s going to (has the capacity to without blowing a major artery) expand his presidential tetralogy to include Trumpland?

    I mean, historians will eventually have to document and analyze the Trump era and holy hell, is that ever going to be an extended slog through an anaerobic sludge digester of politics. “When America Lost Its Shit”™ an obvious title.

  119. 119.

    Will

    @Tony Jay: Honestly, I wouldn’t do anything to win them. They are going to end up Republican in time any way.  However, I don’t think it’s to the benefit of Democrats to push anyone away from the party as fast as we can. Especially when we live in an era where Republicans have a crazy authoritarian streak that might not ever give a chance to vote them out once in. That’s why I am against freaking out and screaming this is racism at the top of our lungs when there are minorities don’t think it is. Let them leave on their accord in time, but don’t kick them out with your boot right into the Republican voting booth.

  120. 120.

    Citizen Alan

    @Roger Moore: that raises an interesting point. My understanding (happy to be corrected/educated) was that a big part of why women’s sports exist at all at the college level is because Title 9 required some degree of parity between money spent on both male and female athletics. So if Ole Miss wants to give 50 football scholarships, it has to find 50 female athletes to give scholarships to, which is why Ole Miss has a nationally ranked Women’s Rifle Team and why their cheerleaders are lavishly paid. Will the ruling interfere with that in any way?

  121. 121.

    Low Key Swagger

    Interesting discussion.  I was listening in the car when this came down and I thought there must be a hundred ways for smart admissions people to get around it.  Yes, zip code came to me first, but wouldn’t income play a role.  What about NAMES?  Easy to pick out many Hispanic and Asian names, and to be truthful, even some African American names.
    Not sure if this means that the admission forms will do away with any outright questions about race.  Probably.  I always wondered if our daughter got into an elite school in part due to our race and ethnicity, even tho she had the grades and extra-curriculars and very good ACT score.  I do know the institution is what they call “needs blind” and boy did that help us afford it.

  122. 122.

    Ramona Rosario

    @Omnes Omnibus: Thanks for introducing Justice Jackson’s dissent. I downloaded her entire dissent and read it. She utterly demolishes the trite pretenses to equality these specious fools make.

  123. 123.

    trollhattan

    @Cacti: This is frequently not the case, although for my kid’s friend her first choice was U of Michigan for their performance school, but she did not get in. Yale was second.

  124. 124.

    Citizen Alan

    @rikyrah: One problem for Democrats is that so many of them don’t understand how many women who were raised in evangelical cultures genuinely desire that. In my extended family, it was nearly scandalous that my mother worked while various relatives babysat me and my sister. Even more so during the period when my dad was laid off from his truck driving job and she was the sole earner. Every one of my five aunts was a housewife.

  125. 125.

    Kent

    @jonas:@Tom Levenson: Dropping standardized test requirements is a double-edged sword. Yes, they often favored students whose families could afford expensive tutoring and coaching, but they were also one of the few ways kids who, say, didn’t really flourish in a traditional grade-based classroom, could nonetheless demonstrate that they had real talent in math or reading or other subject. My most recent high school grad barely passed senior English (said it was “stupid” and “boring”), but got nearly the highest possible score on the Regents exam.  Without that, all there is a report card that may or may not reflect their true abilities and passions.

    Most schools will still ACCEPT and consider test scores, they just don’t require them. So if you have 1600 SATs you can be sure that most schools will see them and take them into consideration.  There aren’t many schools that will refuse to consider test scores as an admissions criteria.

  128. 128.

    rikyrah

    @Will:

    The number of non-Whites admitted under immigration was miniscule.

    It was the Civil Rights Movement and the resulting immigration bill that opened the door to the non-White immigration from Asia  that we see today.

  129. 129.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Will: You’re flat out wrong.

    Go do your homework and go read up on the:

    1917 Barred Zone Act — Restricted immigration from Asia
    1921 Emergency Quote Act — Limited the number of immigrants a year from any country to 3% of those already in the US from that country as per the 1910 census
    1924 Chinese Exclusion Act — Prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years (with some limited exception)
    1965 Hart-Celler Act — Repealed the national-origin quotas
    And many others.

    Not to mention California’s numerous anti-Chinese laws in the mid-late 1800s intended to prevent any Chinese immigrants from entering the state, and to drive out existing immigrants.

  130. 130.

    Citizen Alan

    @rikyrah: The problem with this is that the majority is using a twisted and ahistorical reading of the 14th Amendment to say that it specifically bans race-based consideration. There is, however, nothing that speaks constitutionally to legacy admissions or, indeed, admissions based on anything other than race (and possibly gender; we’ll see).

  131. 131.

    Bupalos

    The angry responders to Will really need to calm down and listen to what he is and isn’t saying.

    As a matter of politics, we are verifiably losing parts of the coalition by relying on backward-looking rhetoric that obviously doesn’t ring true to them. To say “you south asians wouldn’t even be here without 1964” is an argument and claim about what someone owes and should sacrifice for the past. It’s a kind of argument that is likely to be rejected for psychological reasons, and further, to alienate. “You’ll be next” is another popular one that while compelling to those who already see the injustice, also has a really bad track record when it comes to building proactive solidarity.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t strong arguments to make and rhetorical positions to take.  And I think these need to be made in reference primarily to the future and to personal gain. Not to sacrifice for the past, but potential for the future with reference to what we learned from the past. Especially with reference to the reality that the expansion of equality has always been good for us all.

  132. 132.

    Elizabelle

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good of Biden to say that out loud.

    We could have a better USSC if it were a bigger court.  That is seeming doable to me.  The press falling all over themselves with relief over the gerrymandering and NC state legislature rulings?  That would seem to be a tell, no??

  135. 135.

    Jackie

    I support this attitude!

    From The Daily Beast’s David Rothkopf:

    “I think analyses pitting Trump v. Biden may have 2024 wrong. My sense is 2024 will be Democrats vs. the six GOP members of the Supreme Court. SCOTUS views on abortion, affirmative action, voting rights, guns, environment, LGBTQ rights will turn out a big anti-GOP majority.”

    https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1674420828224782339

    Yet ANOTHER reason to GOTV!

  136. 136.

    trollhattan

    @Citizen Alan: I’ll ask runner girl what the Title IX parity criteria are, because IDK with any specificity. She conducted a Title IX audit of her school’s athletics so has immersed herself in the mechanics. She’s also part of a group working on congress to take up a companion bill to Title IX, and happened to be in D.C. on its behalf last year when Dobbs dropped.

  138. 138.

    rikyrah

    @Bupalos:

    Acknowledging the reason WHY you were able to even come to America isn’t a small thing.  It’s truth.

    All their promise wouldn’t have meant shyt without the Civil Rights Movement and the opportunities it afforded to ALL Americans.

     

    Sorry, if as a Black person, I watch my folks do all the hard work, and others come in, and not even acknowledge it., and then turn around and participate willingly in Anti-Blackness.

  139. 139.

    Alison Rose

    @Will: So, your answer is that we should play up to the prejudiced beliefs of SOME (not all, as you seem to believe) Asian and Indian Americans (pssssssst: India is part of Asia!) and tell other POC to get fucked because we don’t want to hurt some bigots’ feelings?

  140. 140.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Cacti:

    2016 Bernie brats who said “give me a reason besides the Supreme Court to vote for her” today belongs to you. 

    Wear your political legacy with pride.

    Exactly!  Stupid fucking selfish children.

  144. 144.

    Low Key Swagger

    @Bupalos: Yes.  If our Party is going to grow, we need to periodically re-examine our messaging and many other things.

  146. 146.

    randy khan

    @Will:

    I am conscious that, at some level, there is a lot of similarity between what elite institutions did with Jewish applicants for many years and what is happening with applicants with Asian backgrounds.  Some of that has been playing out where I live, where the school district changed the standards for admission to the elite high school and there was a big backlash from Asian communities.  The difference, from my perspective – and it undoubtedly doesn’t seem like much of a difference if you’re in the group that seems to bear the burden – is that the Jewish quotas of the 20th century were intended to preserve the privilege of the well-off Christian applicants from “good” families, while affirmative action policies historically have been intended to help groups that have trouble getting into those schools.

    Balancing competing interests like this is very tricky.  Education is supposed to be about opportunity, of course, and figuring out how to give everyone an opportunity is, in the end, impossible.  (And I’d add that I know there are cultural components here, too – reading about the Indian exam system and how getting into the limited number of top schools there can change a student’s life recently gave me some insights I did not have into why this matters to families with South Asian backgrounds, and into the pressure the children often feel.)  So, as a pasty white guy who is long past applying for college myself, I have sympathy for everyone involved.

    (And I’d note that the people who generated this case may be surprised to discover that this may hurt white people in the admissions process as more people of Asian descent get into the top schools.)

  147. 147.

    schrodingers_cat

    @rikyrah: Agreed and barring a third of the population of South Asians that votes R, they know it. Look at the South Asian American vote. Indian Americans have voted for Ds in the past 4 cycles over 70% for the D candidate. (I haven’t seen the data prior to the 2008 election.)

    ETA: Will is a troll (or a regular commenter’s sock puppet) who surfaces to say contentious things regarding race

    ETA2: And if voting patterns of Indian Americans (and South Asian Americans) over the last decade and half if not more are any guide what he is asserting is demonstrably false.

  148. 148.

    Eolirin

    @Bupalos: Racists are going to racist, regardless of whether they’re white or not. Appeals to a better future, when you’re dealing with people who hold their positions because they believe things are inherently zero sum, aren’t going to be any more effective than pointing out the dangers of a lack of solidarity with regard to white racists trying to eliminate them; first they came for is the only argument that matters here because it’s the fundamental reality of the moment. If it’s not convincing, nothing else will be.

    Otherwise we’re better off not even talking about it at all, and redirecting the conversation to how book banning and teacher shortages are going to fuck with their kids and how anti-abortion laws are creating OBGYN shortages and making wanted pregnancy much more likely to kill their women. And we should do that too, but we can’t just erase black people to court Asian votes. We don’t need to support affirmative action by that name, but we do need to be supporting diversity initiatives and keep trying to redress the lack of representation of blacks and Latinos in higher education, and we need to do that regardless of whether some section of the Asian and Indian populations jump ship because of it. It’s the right thing to do and we have a moral obligation to pursue it.

  149. 149.

    James E Powell

    @Bupalos:

    As a matter of politics, we are verifiably losing parts of the coalition by relying on backward-looking rhetoric that obviously doesn’t ring true to them.

    You say verifiably, but you do not verify.

  150. 150.

    JaneE

    In theory, it should be able do show disadvantage independent of race.  Maybe some of those metrics already exist.  Putting them into a framework that can be used for admissions and pass the racial bias tests is another matter.  If that happens it will be years or decades down the road.

    SCOTUS has locked disadvantaged minorities into place (their proper place, of course /s).

  151. 151.

    Scout211

    @Jackie: Yet ANOTHER reason to GOTV!

     

    And another reason to stock up on post card stamps now. The price is going up again on July 9!

  152. 152.

    oldgold

    In my opinion, the purpose of the 14th Amendment was not to amend the the Constitution, but to restate it.

    Ever since the Hayes /Tilden debacle, it has suffered more abuse than a red-haired stepchild.  And, today this sorry history of the 14th Amendment being turned upside down and twist continued.

  153. 153.

    Kent

    Both Washington and California have banned affirmative action for over two decades.  Both laws were passed through initiative and referendum.  Anyone have any idea how many other states have already banned traditional forms of affirmative action?

    In any event, I’m a HS teacher and I tend to think that the real problems with inequities are in the HS level.  And, around here it is mostly to do with expectations, both at the school level and family level.

    I currently teach at several different high schools.  I do long-term science subbing at two different districts and so for the past 3 years I’ve taught the same classes (bio, chem, ap bio, ap chem) at 3 different schools for teachers out on long-term medical and maternity leave.

    I can directly compare the last two schools I’ve taught at:  Similar size, similar budgets and facilities (science labs, equipment, etc.).   So no issues of size, money, or resources.  This one https://www.niche.com/k12/camas-high-school-camas-wa/ is affluent (13% on free/reduced lunch) and mostly white and Asian.  This one is in a poorer area https://www.niche.com/k12/heritage-high-school-vancouver-wa/ and is 62% free and reduced lunch and more Hispanic, less Asian.  I think the Niche stats are a bit out of date as it seems more Black and Hispanic today than the stats suggest.

    In the sciences, the 1st school has 4 or 5 sections of each AP science class that are each fully subscribed (25 students) and all the obscure advanced AP classes like Physics C, AP Computer Science, etc. that are all also fully subscribed.  Attendance is probably 95% as you rarely ever have 1 or 2 students out per period.  And kids come in ready to perform at or above grade level.

    In the second school they struggle to pull enough students to fill 1 section of each AP science class.  My AP chemistry class had 12 kids and my AP biology class had 9 kids.  The district policy is to drop a class if it doesn’t gain at least 20 students so the admin had to fight to even keep those two classes.  In the non-AP classes attendance is more like 65-70% so I typically have 8-10 students gone on any given day and MANY students wind up the semester with 30-40 absences and unable to pass because they are missing 50% or more of the work.  Kids often come into science classes with NONE of the skills they were supposed to learn in middle school (metric system, rudimentary algebra, ability to read a paragraph, etc.).  Partly that was the pandemic, but not entirely.

    The first school pushes out multiple Ivy League caliber admissions every year and dozens upon dozens more kids going to other selective schools.  And probably has 3-times the number of grads going on to 4-year institutions.  The second school rarely has kids even apply to selective schools and those who do go on to college are more tracked into community colleges and regional “directional” schools and nearby branch campuses.  Where they very frequently don’t finish.

    Why does this happen?  Partly it is parental expectations.  They don’t get their kids to school and don’t expect academic excellence.  But a big part of it is also lack of standards, expectations, and guidance within the school administration itself.  Kids can basically aimlessly take whatever classes they want to meet minimum graduation requirements and the culture is to seek out the easiest classes and easiest teachers and the school seems fine with that as long as they are actually showing up for school.  There is frankly no culture of excellence and counselors do not encourage students to challenge themselves.  I have not seen any “if you want to go to college you should take this pathway of courses”.

    What neither the school, parents, and students seem to understand is that they are all in competition with the students at the nearby wealthy school for advancement in life, and those other kids are already kicking their butts from middle school onwards.  And it shows in terms of college admissions and no doubt future economic success.

  154. 154.

    Alison Rose

    @Cacti: I mean…if the family of the Japanese-American guy I dated in my 20s told me I was the only white person or Jew they wanted in their home, I’d have hightailed it the fuck out of there.

  155. 155.

    MisterDancer

    @Bupalos: As a matter of politics, we are verifiably losing parts of the coalition by relying on backward-looking rhetoric that obviously doesn’t ring true to them.

    You cannot keep a coalition by telling groups who have been loyal they have to move aside for fresh new ones. If newer immigrants don’t know how we got here, there is, true, and educational gap.

    But it’s a shitty long-term plan to assume we have to play into that ignorance. It’s horrific to me — someone who’s spent decades trying to get to Truth — to think the only was we hold people is to, basically lie to them.

    That’s what Will advocates, in the main. It’s why there’s such a visceral and fact-based reaction to his proposals.

    Don’t you think South Asians and Chinese folx won’t figure that out? What happens when the Right — as they always do — figure out how to weaponize our “no, you’re right” back at them, to break the coalition? I mean, these are people who in the 1980s leveraged breaks in the Feminist movement to great effect, and not just “Jane Roe”. They know how to abuse truth, and hiding in a comforting lie just makes those breaks all the more easier.

    You don’t have to hurl truths, like a weapon, at people who think different. But neither can we hold a coalition by mollycoddling them — much less by emptying our bench of good, Progressive folx who’ve put in the time and work, to go after a different group.

    We’re gonna have to walk and chew gum at same time. It sux, but it’s what being The Good Guys is like.

  156. 156.

    Dave from the Rustbelt

    This decision was 6-3, with the usual and corrupt suspects forming the majority.  That means that every witless fucker who couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary shares the blame here.

    The same can be said for the people who didn’t vote for Al Gore in 2000.  We would have been spared having both Alito and Roberts.

  157. 157.

    Will

    @Alison Rose: I’m saying don’t go scream into a minority’s face that something is racist if they don’t think it is.

    Yeah, I’ve lived in Asia for years, I have zero fucking clue where India is. I assumed I was in Africa all the years I lived in Mumbai, who woulda thunk it?

    @Cacti: You’re a beautiful person. Ok, sorry, I can’t lie. There is something wrong with you and you need help. The fact I opened up about the things I’ve seen must mean I am brainwashed. A guy that married a woman that is another color and religion now subscribes to their crank parents’ BMW theory!! Oh the humanity!!

    You’re the person that when I try to convince people to look at the people that vote for Trump as an angle is like “Hold my beer” and comes Macho Man Randy Savaging from the top rope on the left. Congratulations!

  158. 158.

    Brachiator

    @Tom Levenson:

    I say this as someone who has both benefitted from my access to such markers and has seen them operate within elite higher ed. It’s true that MIT is much less burdened by some of the bullshit that the Ivys and equivalents are heir to–no legacies, for one thing.  But we aren’t immune.

    I have always included MIT and Caltech with the Ivy League schools.

  160. 160.

    gvg

    @Will: Um boy are you a fool. We tell you to vote democrat because we have historical experience. There is no minority at all of any type, ethnic, religious, economic, health status, sexual orientation or whatever that is not in danger from the republicans. They are in mob mentality baying for blood. They have always like kicking down, but right now in this time, they have been propagandized to be hate junkies and tribal. Even if your local republicans seem friendly allies, the ones a little further aways won’t honor a truce. And they have a habit of judging fast and stupid. They don’t actually care if you are really whatever they think you look like. So you should always care that you live in a society that insists on everybody getting a fair chance. It will NOT work out for you otherwise.

  161. 161.

    Kent

    @Brachiator:I have always included MIT and Caltech with the Ivy League schools.

    Here on the west coast, Stanford has more cache than any of the Ivies.

  162. 162.

    Citizen Alan

    @mrmoshpotato: Sadly, the Supreme Court is not on the ballot for 2024 because barring accident, I don’t foresee any openings before 2028 unless we miraculously get a Congress willing to expand it. Even assuming Biden is reelected, I’m not sure any of the 3 liberals is of an age where retirement is expected, and all of the Sinister Six will hang onto their seats with a death grip.

  163. 163.

    Eolirin

    @Will: Treating things like this that are racist, as if they’re not racist, is throwing black people under the bus to curry favor with another minority.

    It’s not a way to build a strong coalition.

  165. 165.

    Tony Jay

    @Will:

    Interesting plan, but then it’s a matter of timescales and policy platforms not matching up, isn’t it?

    It took the Democrats a very long time to recover from choosing the right side on the issue of Civil Rights, to a point where they’re now very much where the majority of Americans are. Stepping back from that and throwing the African-American vote under the bus just to temporarily pander to another minority group that you think will end up in the Republican camp anyway for some reason? That doesn’t seem like a good bargain, certainly not good enough to even begin cancelling out the millions and millions of votes the Democrats would lose right now if they did something so crass.

    No, I think that all things considered, the Democratic Party are just going to have to stick with calling out obvious racism when it’s obviously racism and hope that your incredibly racist in-laws and their Chinese friends are just really, really terrible people and not at all representative of the morals, ethics, and simple common sense of the wider Indian-American and Chinese-American communities who, after all, are getting daily reminders that where the Republicans are concerned, it absolutely is racism, and their base doesn’t much care what brand of not-white the people they intend to victimise are.

    Fingers crossed, eh?

  166. 166.

    trollhattan

    @Citizen Alan:

    Got this Title IX info:

    “Three main criteria: equal participation; scholarship money; other, including gear, fields, locker rooms, tutoring, etc. ”

    You can see why the elephant in the room is Div 1 football, which has an upper limit of 85 full-ride scholarships. Eighty five! And because most D1 football programs are money-losers, it really bends the athletics metrics in weird ways. My kid’s conference has zero football programs because the schools can’t maintain D1 standards financially. The last  conference school with a football program joins Big 12 July 1. They have 3X the students of the next largest school left in conference, so can make the #s work, I guess.

  167. 167.

    Brachiator

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Thanks for this.

    Because the Court’s opinion is not
    grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.

    Short and to the point.

  168. 168.

    Eolirin

    @Citizen Alan: If we regain the legislature, we can pass laws that overturn some of the recent spate of decisions. It’s not so much that it’d be Biden vs the Supreme Court, as it’d be Democrats vs the Supreme Court. That’d include court reform efforts.

    And it’d include fighting for every congressional district we can. If it was successful, Biden would win by an even larger margin, but it’d be on the back of reverse coat tails.

  169. 169.

    Alison Rose

    @Will: I’m aware that you know India is part of Asia, but saying “Asian and Indian” in the course of your absurd comments made me choose to be snarky. Also, your responses here aren’t doing you any favors. First you just sounded ignorant (as evidenced by the people who had to correct you on facts), now you sound like a fucking jerk.

    My liberal politics do not and will not ever include shitting on one minority to butter up another. And anyone, no matter their identity, who needs that in order to support decent candidates is themselves not a decent person and can fuck off. If there are some POC who want to support Republicans because they’re prejudiced against other POC , they can get in the bin along with their chosen electeds.

  172. 172.

    Kay

    @Kent:

    And it shows in terms of college admissions and no doubt future economic success.

    I agree with you up until that last. You really, really do not need to attend a selective college for economic success. You don’t even need especially good grades in college. Just review your own circle – acquaintances, etc and try to connect financial success with a selective school OR academic excellence. You won’t find a real strong connection. An elite school is nice to have, but it’s in no way essential to make money. The wealthiest person in my social circle attended a not very competitive Wisconsin public college and was a C student.

  173. 173.

    Citizen Alan

    @Dave from the Rustbelt: Alito and Roberts both came on during Bush’s 2nd term. As furious as I was over Bush v Gore, at the time, I was also optimistic because I felt confident that none of the Justices would step down under those circumstances and I was right. And I also thought Dubya would be such a fuckup that a Dem would win in 2004. But then, 9/11 happened, Dubya became a “war time president,” and the media savaged the Dems for even daring to run against him during a war.

  174. 174.

    Kent

    Part of this is a “forest for the trees” issue.

    The REAL threat to Black and Hispanic educational achievement in this country is not whether the top 0.1% get into Harvard, but things like the enormous wave of charter schools and voucher programs that are (by purpose) bleeding public schools to death in many red and red-adjacent states.  Yet aside from the usual suspects like teachers unions I see very little national pushback on an of this.  For example, where is the legislation and outrage in Congress about red states that are defunding public schools by funneling billions of public dollars to discriminatory private religious schools?  That affects millions of more poor students and students of color than affirmative action at elite schools.

    There is a very systematic and deep-pocketed conspiracy in this country to tear apart our entire system of public education and we are focusing on elite admissions to elite colleges?  I generally support affirmative action but I recognize it has become toxic and there are probably better and easier ways to achieve the same thing while we focus on the real issues with American education.

  175. 175.

    Scout211

    @Citizen Alan: Sadly, the Supreme Court is not on the ballot for 2024 because barring accident, I don’t foresee any openings before 2028 unless we miraculously get a Congress willing to expand it.

    I can’t predict the future either. But no one predicted Scalia would drop dead on a hunting trip, so things can happen that are unexpected. And I do think there is a large portion of the electorate that understands that the president nominates and the Senate votes on the nominee. It’s been a huge spectacle lately (except for KBJ).

    More voters are aware of how the SCOTUS justices vote  and which ones ended Roe v Wade, in particular . And if they don’t know, we need to let them know like what happened in the state Supreme Court election recently in Wisconsin.

  176. 176.

    Brachiator

    @Kent:

    Here on the west coast, Stanford has more cache than any of the Ivies.

    Not when I was looking at colleges. And I am in Southern California.

    But Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, a number of schools had their own level of renown.

     

    ETA. It’s a reminder of ancient times, but I was accepted to Stanford, but chose not to attend, mainly because I wanted to go to school out of California.

  178. 178.

    gvg

    @Will: But it is racism. Keeping quiet is a lie and its a lie of a kid that would lose the large number of voters we already have. You don’t understand US.

    You are lecturing us about not understanding a small potential or very soft sometime yes sometime no group of voters. We are part of a large, painfully constructed coalition of many other groups, some small some large, and we aren’t going to keep them together by stabbing them in the back. Even the ones not stabbed personally will say…hmm, think I will find safer allies. You get that?

    So shove off. You sound like a saboteur.

  179. 179.

    Kay

    @Kent:

     Yet aside from the usual suspects like teachers unions I see very little national pushback on an of this.  For example, where is the legislation and outrage in Congress about red states that are defunding public schools by funneling billions of public dollars to discriminatory private religious schools?  That affects millions of more poor students and students of color than affirmative action at elite schools.

    Agree again and I’m glad we have a working public school teacher commenting here for a ground perspective.
    There IS a liberal coalition that is pro public schools though- it just isn’t very big or well funded. They’re passionate though and they can and have swung state level elections.

  180. 180.

    Citizen Alan

    @trollhattan: That was basically my understanding. The question now is: Will that hold up constitutionally after today’s opinion. Because if the college’s don’t have to match their football team budgets against women’s sports budgets, will women’s sports programs that don’t generate profits survive?

  182. 182.

    Eolirin

    @Kay: The single strongest predictor of financial success is existing familial wealth. This is part of why access to Ivy’s matter for people who weren’t born into rich families; they’re an opportunity to get access to some of the benefits of that wealth, by providing an opportunity to network with the people who were born into it.

    And things are very different at the very top of the income distribution than they are further down. You can make good money doing a lot of things, but it’s much harder to make stupid money if you’re not part of the club. Whether that’s worth chasing is another matter, but in some parts of the country, it’s necessary if you want to be able to afford housing.

  183. 183.

    MisterDancer

    @Will: The fact I opened up about the things I’ve seen must mean I am brainwashed.

    No. The fact that people are in mourning and you decided to dump your theory of why we have to accept some bigotry, is the issue.

    See, Will, some of us are those “one more African American male into college” kids. We’re looking at this, and I feel way beyond “some kind of way” about this ruling, and it’s import for kids like me.

    But I’m also not ignorant that changes are wise. I said in a private fora this AM the following:

    It’s a shitty fuckwad of a decision. It’s also something that — in a MUCH wiser Court — would be a key point; that race is itself such a challenging construct than the “other factors” Conservatives love to prattle on about actually are worth considering in, maybe, a richer mix than we do today.

    I think a lot of us are open to that discussion. As others have noted, two states have already shifted approaches to balancing race. It’s an open debate…

    …but what you said is not a debate. It’s an open invitation to agreeing with bigotry. And as sympathetic to the situation as I am (and I am, for reasons I don;’t discuss in public, even pseudo-anonymously), I cannot align to your political assertions, but it’s not just politics — it’s real people’s lives you’re screwing around with, the very essence of who we are and how we walk in this world.

    I’ve gone up against a lot of people on this blog because I don’t like bigotry, point blank. I take it personal. And yes, I can discuss this “rationally,” see my prior post.

    But also, history tells us, to, that saying we need to align to a prejudice, even well-meaning, is very much how the GOP ended up as it did. There’s a whole story about how the fear of electoral lockout caused  the GOP of Lincoln to mutate into this present form, which is part of why we keep saying there’s history here you’re not seeing.

    I know that’s another part of the “don’t talk down” you’re trying to warn of. But at some point, you have to draw bright lines of what’s right and moral, even in political processes. We know what happens, if you do not.

    And yes, this is one of them.

  185. 185.

    Bupalos

    @rikyrah: It’s enraging, frankly. I’m not sure there’s a stronger human political emotion than betrayal, or of seeing one’s work appropriated by others and turned against oneself. And that’s at the heart of the black experience in America from the seventeenth century.

    But the functional question here is how we get back to building solidarity and the coalition that expands equality. We aren’t going to power a movement for a more just, democratic, and sustainable world on rage or recrimination – even where it might be richly deserved. That emphasis is only going to serve our opponents.

    Which is only to say I agree there’s damage in having ‘racism’ be the loudest word in our response here. Our opponents expect it and will use it. The word needs to be there because yeah, it’s definitely racist as fuck. I think a little education around immigration racism and 1964 is in order too.

    But the loud part needs to be explaining something we seem to be either above explaining or frequently too angry to explain. Like how “color blindness” actually works to perpetuate racist structures and segregation. Like how ethnic balkanization makes us all less happy and free and less American.  Like how broadening equality can work as it’s always worked – for a better FUTURE, and is for ALL OF US.

  186. 186.

    trollhattan

    @Citizen Alan: Suppose some billionaire Alabama football fan can spin up a challenge to Title IX and give it a go. Would not surprise me in the least.

  187. 187.

    Citizen Alan

    @Scout211:

    But no one predicted Scalia would drop dead on a hunting trip, so things can happen that are unexpected.

    I don’t know about that. It certainly wasn’t a shocking development that a 79yo obese man who seemed to live in a perpetual rage state might keel over dead.

  188. 188.

    geg6

    I’m trying to figure out if this will actually affect my employer. I’m not really sure if it will. We don’t use SAT/ACT. We only use weighted high school GPAs. And we have 20 undergraduate campuses (plus a four-year vocational college and three professional grad campuses) across the Commonwealth. As long as you had at least a 2.0 (weighted) HSGPA, you will be accepted at one of the undergrad campuses or at the Pennsylvania Technical College. But I’m a financial aid professional, not an admissions professional. So I guess I’ll have to wait for our admissions people to send out an explanation, if needed.

  189. 189.

    Matt McIrvin

    @schrodingers_cat: I see white people saying all the time that Indian-Americans are super right-wing and it doesn’t jibe with the opinions of people I personally know. It feels like there’s a loud subset who have gotten really good at convincing people they speak for the whole group.

  190. 190.

    Will

    @Alison Rose: Trashy comment. You’d literally throw a good human being under the bus cause of their family? Sorry babe, you are an amazing human being, but I can’t marry you cause some very online people on a blog might judge me because of your parents.

    @schrodingers_cat: I’ve been commenting on this blog since 2006. I don’t comment a lot as I’m mostly here for the big guy and Tom. I only jump in when I think I can provide something, in this case, being aware that there are minorities happy about this ruling.

    On days when I wonder how on earth Democrats don’t control everything I think about the people that rage on this blog and starting name calling and remember “Ah, because those are my allies.”

  191. 191.

    Kent

    @Kay:I agree with you up until that last. You really, really do not need to attend a selective college for economic success. You don’t even need especially good grades in college. Just review your own circle – acquaintances, etc and try to connect financial success with a selective school OR academic excellence. You won’t find a real strong connection. An elite school is nice to have, but it’s in no way essential to make money. The wealthiest person in my social circle attended a not very competitive Wisconsin public college and was a C student.

    I’m not talking about elite admissions, but college admissions in general.

    At the wealthier HS large numbers of students go on to 4-year colleges that are not necessarily selective but legit 4-year colleges where they tend to graduate.  Here in the west we have the Western Undergraduate Exchange which grants reciprocal in-state tuition across 10 states.  So at wealthy Camas HS I have MANY students going on to places like Washington State, Oregon State, Arizona, Boise State, Utah, Montana State, Western Washington, Cal Poly, etc.   Those 4-year schools tend to do a relatively decent job of retaining students.  Especially after you commit to leaving home to going to one of them.

    At the poorer Heritage HS, if kids go on to college at all it tends to be to one of the local community colleges in the Portland metro to (get their basics out of the way) or sometimes the local WSU-Vancouver branch campus.  Where vast numbers of them don’t actually finish.  They get to community college and realize that they didn’t like math and English when they were in HS and still don’t like it and then drift away back to their mall or fast food jobs but now with student loans hanging over their heads and no degree (only about 25% of community college students actually earn degrees depending on the state).  If you never leave home or work then the commitment to college seems to be FAR less and success rates are consequently much lower.

    So it is MUCH MUCH more than simply elite college admissions.

  192. 192.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah:

    So when your ass doesn’t get into the college your parents said you deserved over everyone.  Who are you going to blame now?

    Because y’all can’t use Affirmative action as your excuse anymore.  Because y’all loved to use it.

    All of this.

    In a few years, when very very few in-state students are still getting into VA’s flagship universities, there’s going to be a lot of cranky white suburban parents who never stopped to consider that the reason their little darling STILL can’t get in isn’t affirmative action – it’s the nearly static/extremely slow growth of those institutions, coupled with all of the out-of-state students they accept because states are afraid to progressively tax their rich folks for more funding.

  193. 193.

    Ramona

    @rikyrah: EXACTLY! Speaking as an immigrant from the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, in 1965, when LBJ successfully pushed to permit immigration from all over the globe rather than only Europe, conservatives extracted the concession of closing off the southern border that had hitherto permitted free travel back and forth thus creating the so-called “border crisis”. I strive for the opportunity to explain this to those few citizens of Asian origin who claim their parents came here legally unlike the undocumented here.

  194. 194.

    geg6

    @Burnspbesq: ​
     
    The Chronicle of Higher Ed has been running articles for a year about this. Anyone who wasn’t ready for it in the industry had their heads buried in the sand.

  196. 196.

    narya

    @geg6: Yup. The (black, female) president of my alma mater–Oberlin, where, yes, I was on the student council–had an email out by 11:38 CST, committing the college to continuing the diversity that was part of its founding. She highlighted the fact that the first black woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in the United States, Mary Jane Patterson, graduated from Oberlin in 1862.

  197. 197.

    Kent

    @Matt McIrvin:@schrodingers_cat: I see white people saying all the time that Indian-Americans are super right-wing and it doesn’t jibe with the opinions of people I personally know. It feels like there’s a loud subset who have gotten really good at convincing people they speak for the whole group.

    I have a sample size of maybe 20.  All in the tech, education, and medical fields here in WA and TX (neighbors and co-workers of me or my wife).  None of them strike me as right-wingers or MAGA in any way.  But generally very middle of the road and not caught up in culture war issues in the slightest.

    Now my wife’s Filipino co-workers are a slightly different story.  Some of them are STILL Trumpers.

  198. 198.

    Alison Rose

    @Will: I’m absolutely not going to marry someone whose family is full of bigots, unless that person has nothing to do with them. I deal with enough antisemitism from the wider world — I sure as shit am not inviting it into my fucking home. If YOU have no problem hanging around people who express hateful views, that says something about your own character. And if those hateful views are aimed at the minority I myself am a part of — a minority which has been the victim of multiple attempts at complete annihilation and eradication over centuries and centuries, and which is still the constant target of deadly violence — then you bet your whiny self-important ass I will not be having any Sunday dinners with them.

    Just because you have a “thank you sir may I have another” kink doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.

  199. 199.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony Jay:

    It took the Democrats a very long time to recover from choosing the right side on the issue of Civil Rights, to a point where they’re now very much where the majority of Americans are.

    But still not where the center of power is. Not quite.

    And I worry about the ability of power to push the majority opinion back, by brute force. But I do think there are more of us than there are of them.

  200. 200.

    Eolirin

    @Will: No one makes voting decisions on the basis of things said on this blog. Democrats don’t control everything because there are people that are happy about this decision. Republicans have electoral success because enough people are racist, indifferent, and cruel, that they can hold together a coalition by promising them to direct cruelty at people that are not them, and sometimes offering to benefit them economically by means of that cruelty.

  201. 201.

    Brachiator

    @Eolirin:

    The single strongest predictor of financial success is existing familial wealth. This is part of why access to Ivy’s matter for people who weren’t born into rich families; they’re an opportunity to get access to some of the benefits of that wealth, by providing an opportunity to network with the people who were born into it.

    Ivies and other schools have a number of socially prominent families who are not necessarily especially rich.

    You saw some of this with the California college scandal where children of wealthy celebrities got into schools like UCLA and USC to gain the special elan of being admitted to an elite school. This helps reinforce the myth that there is an elite class who deserve the best of everything.

    And these kids would retcon their lives, coming to believe that just because their parents had achieved something or were wealthy, then it meant that they must also been fated to deserve the high life.

  202. 202.

    Kay

    @Kent:

    Agree. We did a program at our local high school where we helped lower income students pick schools. They’re 98% white but + 50 per cent low income. I really enjoying getting them to think about VALUE rather than name or peoples ideas about what is valuable and “graduating” was hugely important.

    I DO notice they tend to choose “practical” majors like nursing or accounting or engineering, but I think that’s a function of being first generation. We had one really talented poor kid who we could have gotten into a really selective school but it turned out he was VERY close to his family and wanted to stay local. He graduated and I think having his family- his father, primarily – close helped.

  203. 203.

    Ramona

    @Will: There were very, very few Indians here before 1965 when LBJ successfully pushed to open immigration to the whole globe. How many adult Indians have you met whose grandparents immigrated here?

  204. 204.

    geg6

    @randy khan: ​
     
    Many of the “elite” privates quit using standardized test scores several years ago. You could call my employer a top tier public and we quit using them several years ago ourselves. The gaming of the tests made them less than useless. Now, if there was only something we could do about high school grade inflation…in almost 25 years, I have only seen a handful of high school students who took calculus at their school (not in AP or dual enrollment classes) who were actually prepared for a college calculus class. And don’t get me started on their English skills…

  205. 205.

    Jackie

    @Citizen Alan: The Hill has an interesting POV re SCOTUS and the 2024 elections.

    “Lawmakers are looking ahead to the 2024 election as a pivotal opportunity to shape the future of the Supreme Court because of the possibility that conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, 75, and Samuel Alito, 73, could retire,” The Hill reports.”

    Even if neither retire, unexpected deaths are always a possibility ie Scalia.

  206. 206.

    MisterDancer

    @Bupalos: But the loud part needs to be explaining something we seem to be either above explaining or frequently too angry to explain.

    It’s been less than 24 hours. As someone who recalls well the reaction to just the leak of Dobbs — much less the ruling itself — and a host of other fresh-to-us news, it’s normal for people to mourn and rage and express anger, in this moment.

    I get you’re likely saying “in general,’ and not specific to this comment section. That there’s a lack of conversation on broader topics and how to raise these concerns in ways that don’t trigger off.

    But…latching onto Will’s comments is not the best plan for raising those, in my opinion. Will may have great intentions, but his insistence that certain kinds of racism (for that is what it is) should be provisionally allowed in order to ensure a Democratic “Big Tent” is the opposite of what you say in your last paragraph. That tent will at best implode if you try to retain groups in the way he implies the Party should do.

    And, unlike the GOP, we’re not likely to be propped up with billions as that imposition occurs.

  207. 207.

    jonas

    @Kay:You won’t find a real strong connection. An elite school is nice to have, but it’s in no way essential to make money.

    Yep — numerous studies have shown that a school’s reputation may be correlated to a graduate’s *initial* salary, but over a lifetime, many other factors take over and it pretty much evens out.

  210. 210.

    Low Key Swagger

    @Will: You are not alone in this experience here.  It’s kinda funny to me as my wife frequently encounters this when talking about immigration reform.  She is white, but married to a Hispanic, and so people say things like “oh because you are married to a Mexican you have a deeper understanding of the issue than ME??!!! Her answer is yes.  Not simply because of marital status, but because I’ve spent 30 yrs with this man and his family, heard their stories, and it has given me a perception I might not otherwise have had.
    I too have been here for nearly two decades.  I rarely comment because I like to weigh things for awhile and by the time I have a firm grip on how I feel about it…the thread is long dead.  Another reason is that I often lack the writing ability of many jackals and usually someone says it more gooder.  But dear god did your observation of supposed allies hit home with me.

  211. 211.

    MisterDancer

    @Alison Rose: I’m absolutely not going to marry someone whose family is full of bigots

    Without going into, again, personal details, I’m living that right fuckin’ now. It’s a sacrifice to draw a line against family that hates, and to not give into it, to just get along and keep head down.

    But sometimes setting that boundary, and all the pain it causes? Is the only way to live with the person you see in the mirror, everyday.

  212. 212.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @JPL: the big leak– I assume intended to boost sales– is that trump talked a lot about how hot Ivanka was, at one point John Kelly felt compelled to remind The Beast he was talking about his own daughter, and later told Taylor he thought trump was sick.

    I assume “sources close to” Kelly will decline to comment

  213. 213.

    Tony Jay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Fair point. You’re a lot closer to rebalancing that centre of power than we are, though, and it’s important to have that recognised.

    Frex, over here, the ghastly melts in charge of the ‘progressive’ party are all in on pandering to racist voters and corporate donors, and seem to get off on telling everyone who has a problem with their direction of travel that’s they’re a bunch of Tory enabling Jew-haters whose votes they don’t want but deserve anyway.

    Even with the MAGOP fighting fang and claw to maintain White supremacist control over your nation’s future, I’d much rather be in your shoes than the ones with holes, sewage and cheap Union Jack swooshes on.

  214. 214.

    jonas

    @geg6: And don’t get me started on their English skills…

    English reading and composition skills are basically no longer taught in any meaningful way in most American public high schools. I know people who teach at Princeton who tell me the only students who can write a decent paper anymore are mostly the foreign ones who learned English as a second language.

  215. 215.

    Roger Moore

    @Citizen Alan:

    This shouldn’t interfere with Title IX for sports.  FWIW, “some kind of parity” is probably the best description.  Title IX is pretty complicated, and schools can meet the “some kind of parity” requirement several different ways:

    1. Having the same number of scholarships and teams for men and women.
    2. Having a proportional number of scholarships and teams.  This is important for schools that have skewed gender ratios.  If they have twice as many women as men, they could probably still get in trouble if they have absolute parity between the number of scholarships, but if they have many more men than women they can probably get by if an equal percentage of the women have scholarships.
    3. By meeting all the demonstrated demand for sports.  For example, if there aren’t enough women at the school who are interested in a particular sport to make a working team, the school would probably win a suit complaining about not having a team in that sport.
    4. By showing continued progress toward equality.  This was more important back when Title IX was a new thing and schools couldn’t realistically be expected to fix everything overnight.
  216. 216.

    Scout211

    @Citizen Alan: True. Scalia wasn’t the healthiest.

    But Scalia’s vacancy is the reason why we need to keep the Senate blue just in case there is an unexpected vacancy. So every election is crucial when it comes to filling SCOTUS vacancies.

  219. 219.

    Alison Rose

    @MisterDancer: Not regarding your situation since of course I don’t know it, but IMO, it doesn’t matter how non-bigoted someone’s SO may be if they continue to closely associate with their family who are all overtly bigoted, in part because by doing so, they are demanding that their partner willingly subject themselves to it. If you love and care for someone, you should not want them to experience harassment and pain and stress. And demanding they do so because FAAAAAAAMILY is no less fucked up than if these were friends or neighbors or coworkers or any other group.

  220. 220.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Mike in NC:

    The latest claim from Taylor? Trump was a misogynistic pig throughout his tenure in the White House, and some of his most shocking comments came at the expense of his own daughter. 

    GFY Taylor!  That’s no surprise!

    I would be surprised if Tiffany was the target of Dump’s pigishness (apologies to barnyard animals) and not the daughter he wants to fuck.

  221. 221.

    Will

    @Ramona: That’s a good question. I know several grandparent age Indians that have immigrated, but they weren’t kids when they did, they were adults.

    @Alison Rose: Again, never once did I mention my wife as subscribing to their values. I mean Jesus fucking Christ, she violated the W commandment of no BMWs. My wife and her sister hid as small children under the bed while Hindu rioters ransacked her neighborhood killing and raping. Since you want to get on that persecution kick, how many beds have you had to hide under? Did you have to listen to your mother raped?

    I married my wife cause she is a fucking beautiful soul that wants to help people. Every now and then we are around her family because she doesn’t want to give up on them. She thinks everyone is capable of eventually seeing the good. So whatever rage you feel that makes you think entitled to just shit on people at random, you need to learn to get a grip on it.

  222. 222.

    MisterDancer

    @Tony Jay: Frex, over here, the ghastly melts in charge of the ‘progressive’ party are all in on pandering to racist voters and corporate donors, and seem to get off on telling everyone who has a problem with their direction of travel that’s they’re a bunch of Tory enabling Jew-haters whose votes they don’t want but deserve anyway.

    Right — from what I gather, Keir and his fools are, in fact, doing some of what Will is talking about as the future for the Democratic Party. And pushing away the core voting bloc along the way.

    I don’t think it’s working out even short-term for them. Much less if they ever manage to get back into power, and have to pay back all the crap promises they are making right now.

  223. 223.

    MazeDancer

    If I were Black and of college age, would try to get in Spelman or Howard. Rest easy, learn big.

    Pretty sure I only got into my swell NorthEast college because I was from the South.

    And for some happier opportunities: Low cost, cool dog alert

    Gorgeous spaniel for ridiculously low adoption fee of $110. People just want their pup to be happier. Gets along with cats.

    The Herd, which is helping offer this pup, is a magnificent rescue group.

    So if you want a fancy dog and a rescue, this is your chance.

  224. 224.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony Jay: Every election feels like Armageddon, a knife-edge battle for the future, and it gets exhausting after a while.

    But I will say this–our big center-left party is good these days, and pointed in the correct direction. Better than they were even 20 years ago. We have a fringe that haven’t gotten the message about that, but it’s true.

  225. 225.

    Kent

    @geg6:Many of the “elite” privates quit using standardized test scores several years ago. You could call my employer a top tier public and we quit using them several years ago ourselves. The gaming of the tests made them less than useless. Now, if there was only something we could do about high school grade inflation…in almost 25 years, I have only seen a handful of high school students who took calculus at their school (not in AP or dual enrollment classes) who were actually prepared for a college calculus class. And don’t get me started on their English skills…

    I think most schools have actually gone to “test optional” which means they aren’t required, but if you are a particular student for whom test scores best demonstrates your aptitude you are free to submit them and they can use them as part of the comprehensive evaluation of your application.

  226. 226.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MazeDancer: Our leading HBCUs are amazing and supporting them might indeed be the best way forward. In a way it’s a concession to re-segregation but what choice is there?

  227. 227.

    mrmoshpotato

    @jonas:

    One thing I’ve noticed about the Biden administration is a distinct lack of disaffected staffers and cabinet members resigning in disgust and then penning tell-all memoirs about what a deranged idiot their boss was. 

    Funny that.

    It is the STRANGEST thing! (ALL THE SARCASM, KATIE!)

  228. 228.

    Alison Rose

    @Will: No, I never listened to my mother being raped.

    Have you been raped yourself? You wanna compare traumas with me? You want to go there?

    And if you think I’m on a “persecution kick” BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST, you can absolutely go play in traffic, you hateful sack of shit.

  229. 229.

    Kent

    @Roger Moore:This shouldn’t interfere with Title IX for sports.  FWIW, “some kind of parity” is probably the best description.  Title IX is pretty complicated, and schools can meet the “some kind of parity” requirement several different ways:

    It won’t interfere with it at all.  This has nothing to do with sex or gender-based admissions criteria.  And SCOTUS has previously upheld the constitutionality of single-sex schools which obviously discriminate on the basis of sex.

  230. 230.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Do you think it’s a coincidence that Will just suddenly showed up?

  232. 232.

    oldgold

    A footnote in today’s opinion exempts the military academies. Seems strange and illogical.

  233. 233.

    Freemark

    @Cacti: ​
    @mrmoshpotato: ​
    You know Bernie 2016 voters voted for Hilary. Matter of fact Bernie supporters voted for Hilary in much higher numbers than Hilary supporters voted for Obama. But I know feelings are much more important than facts.
    Hilary’s race was so close everything and nothing is responsible for her loss. Blaming Bernie primary supporters, who voted for her somewhere between 88% and 94% is pretty damn stupid. That is a much higher than normal cross-over vote from primaries. Hilary voters only voted for Obama at a 75% rate. So actually Bernie supporters are much better Democrats than Hilary supporters if that is the criteria you actually want to use.​
    ​
    ​

  237. 237.

    geg6

    @Kent: ​
     
    Yes, this. We will accept the scores if a student wants to use them. But no requirements on that. I myself have seen the vast discrepancies that used to happen between SAT/ACT scores and actual HS GPAs. And the even bigger discrepancies of the scores against their GPAs here. I have always considered these exams bogus. I’m a perfect example of how bogus they are. To up my GRE scores, I got a book on game theory in test taking and used it before taking the test. I have never once gotten a high score in a math class more advanced than addition, subtraction, multiplying and dividing. I passed in high school with okay grades, but worked hard in college to negotiate with the faculty senate and my advisor to skip math credit requirements by taking extra science classes and got that approved. But I got an almost perfect score on the GRE math section. Game theory works perfectly for multiple choice tests. Lots of people know this or I would never have found that book back then.

  238. 238.

    Eolirin

    @Low Key Swagger: The person making the comment about Will being an Indian whisperer because he’s married to an Indian is herself an Indian, and only recently naturalized. If your wife is getting that reaction from Mexicans, it means something very different than if she’s getting it from white people.

  239. 239.

    piratedan

    strikes me that people are people, good ones (or what we choose to define as “good) come in all shapes and sizes, just like bad ones do.  The color of your skin, your faith or lack thereof or your ethnicity does not determine if you are good or bad; rather your choices and deeds on how you choose to go thru life is more representative.  In this case, as we’ve seen before, that there is an not so insignificant amount of people that are dead set against sharing their privileges’ and will use any mechanism at hand to maintain them.

  240. 240.

    Ramona

    @rikyrah: I agree wholeheartedly with you! I am a POC from the Indian subcontinent and I wish that more of my fellow Asian US citizens would acknowledge the debt we owe to the very brave Black people, both leaders and ordinary folks, who risked their lives and spent blood to bring civil rights to ALL!

  241. 241.

    Will

    @Alison Rose: No I don’t want to play trauma games, but you evidently do. You used the Holocaust as an out for you to shit on my wife because you jumped to conclusions about her. I’ve been physically beaten for supporting my liberal views. I can’t open my jaw properly or raise an arm past my shoulder height. That doesn’t give me an out to be a nasty shit to you nor would I take it. You just need to accept you were an asshole and judgemental about someone you shouldn’t have and move on.

  242. 242.

    Another Scott

    @Kent: Thanks for your perspective.

    It supports my mantra – “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

    When I was in high school, back in olden days, I had no idea of the importance of the PSAT (which (at least back then) screened for National Merit Scholars).  I thought it was just a warmup for the SAT and no big deal.  I did Ok on it, but didn’t do any of the test-prep work, and could have done much better.  When the results were announced in school, one of the girls in our class did very, very well, and I realized the missed opportunity…

    Kids and parents aren’t going to know about stuff like that unless the schools tell them early and often.  It’s my understanding that guidance councilors are hopelessly overworked, so putting the job on them to inform parents is probably hopeless.

    Some parents will know.  But, in general, it should be the whole school administration and teaching staff working together to let kids know that they’re forging the links of their future every day in school, and that they should be looking ahead (not necessarily at any particular school, but thinking about what they need to do to have the kind of life as an adult that they want – and the necessary steps to get there).  Put up posters and have regular gatherings and Q&As about the things that colleges and trade schools and apprenticeship programs are looking for.  If we just leave it to parents (who have no experience with this stuff), then progress is going to be needlessly slow.

    My $0.02.

    Good luck!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  245. 245.

    MisterDancer

    @The Thin Black Duke: Oh no. Will isn’t just married to an Indian, he’s worked in India. And had some…fun comments about workers from India back in Nov of last year:

    H-1B visa holders are likely the cheapest employees on the books, they are likely going to be the last ones to be fired. This plight of hard work you speak of isn’t a plight to them, excessive hours to us is just normal work to a lot of them. If you’ve ever worked outside the western world, you see something more akin to when our society was when it just industrialized with crazy long hours and very little personal time. There is a reason why companies love getting these types of employees. My wife’s boss has to logon and tell her to stop working almost every night.

    Also, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to get wheepy about some nerds having to work 80 hours a week and sleep on a floor. God forbid they ever had to have a job where they had to do 60 hours in either freezing or flaming weather or couldn’t show up hungover cause every piece of equipment around them could maul them. We’ve jumped the shark when the idea of white collar employees having to pull some all nighters is an issue of cruelty. At one point I spent six months straight working close to 70 hours a week in India, twitter engineers crying after a week of it just disgusts me.

    He and I, among others, tangled from that point forward. So no, he’s not new.

    That’s not to say I approve.

  246. 246.

    Alison Rose

    @Will: I jumped to no conclusions about your wife in particular. I am of the belief that choosing to continue relationships with people who hold overly hateful views is a negative trait. I did not “use the Holocaust” as an out, I mentioned it in part of explaining that because my people have suffered hundreds and hundreds of years of violent oppression and attempts at eradication, I am not going to sit around with people who think those were good things, even if they managed to produce a child who does not agree.

    And I cannot fucking believe you have the gall to compare jaw and arm problems to being raped. Men do this constantly, so pro-tip: BEING BEATEN UP IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING RAPED. You are an absolute waste of space and since you’ve made it clear you do not care about anyone except yourself and your wife and for some reason you wife’s bigoted family, I am not going to continue responding to you. I mean, you know, I’m just a big meanie Jewish rape victim, who the hell am I to SHOCK HORROR stand up for myself.

    Have the day you deserve, you ambulatory pile of garbage.

  247. 247.

    rikyrah

    Portia  McGonagal portiamcgonagal1619 on Insta (@PortiaMcGonagal) tweeted at 10:36 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    This is all I’m going to say today about #SCOTUS AA ruling. If white gays don’t think they’d gut Obergefell when given the chance, you’re kidding yourselves. If people in interracial marriages don’t think they’d gut Loving, same. That includes several Black Repubs.
    (https://twitter.com/PortiaMcGonagal/status/1674441716148092928?t=JuyWnAcMHXCWTBd6-1e7vA&s=03)

  248. 248.

    Will

    @schrodingers_cat: Yeah, I only pop out to say incredibly racist things about black people. I’m sure you’ll happily provide a citation list of all these crazy racist things, right? Right?

  249. 249.

    geg6

    @Tony Jay: ​
     
    Gotta say, my experience with South Asian and Asian students and their families is nothing like this guy’s in-laws and their Chinese friends.

  251. 251.

    Kent

    @rikyrah:

    Candidly Tiff (@tify330) tweeted at 11:14 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    Justice Thomas – G.H.W Bush
    Justice Roberts- G.W. Bush
    Justice Alito – G.W. Bush
    Justice Gorsuch – Trump
    Justice Kavanaugh – Trump
    Justice Coney Barrett – Trump

    2000 & 2016 election will forever haunt us don’t make the same mistake in 2024 #VoteBlueEveryElection https://t.co/KciZz9tXG2
    (https://twitter.com/tify330/status/1674451355614715904?t=SJ6cIIpGORNNy7eEmNt8VA&s=03)

    Don’t forget the 2010 election which was equally important and set up the Republican majorities with gerrymandered permanent GOP control in many states after the 2010 census and forward into the 2020 census.  That was the first election after Citizens United and the flood of dark money into US politics is what gave us the astroturf “tea party” nonsense.

    Democrats lost SIX Senate seats in the 2010 election which ultimately gave the Senate to the GOP in 2014 which is what gave us Gorsuch instead of Garland.

    Without Democratic losses in 2010 and RBJ’s decision to toss her legacy into a raging dumpster fire by refusing to retire when she knew she had cancer, we would have a 5-4 liberal majority on the court RIGHT NOW.  Gorush and Barrett would be replaced by Democratically-appointed justices.

  253. 253.

    MisterDancer

    @Will: My wife and her sister hid as small children under the bed while Hindu rioters ransacked her neighborhood killing and raping. Since you want to get on that persecution kick, how many beds have you had to hide under? Did you have to listen to your mother raped?

    I want to be clear. You, at this point, can fuck right off.

    As noted below, I’ve not forgotten the last time you and I had a “discussion” here. Your opinions were horrific then, and they continue to be so.

  254. 254.

    Will

    @Alison Rose: You are a horrible person. You are free to walk away from the asshole take you had that you would literally throw someone away because of who their parents are. You’re trauma doesn’t excuse you shitting on good people. You aren’t better than the MAGAtards, you are them in different clothing when you behave that way.

  255. 255.

    rikyrah

    I understand his sentiment. But, let’s be for real. Too many unqualified 2520’s are hired and promoted over more experienced and better educated non-Whites. They don’t want for anyone to go into THOSE weeds, because they could never justify them. Not private industry. And, the government has so many req’s for you to pass on their applications.

     

    Those requirements were brought on once Blacks were able to apply for those positions. How many folks worked in City, County and State governments with only a High School Diploma as a requirement?

    Skeptical Brotha 💛🐝🌈 (@skepticalbrotha) tweeted at 11:13 AM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023: Striking down #AffirmativeAction in employment will be next. I’m fucking angry about today’s decision after what we know about slavery’s role in building these elite institutions. It’s unconscionable and incredibly myopic & racist. Slaves are literally buried on both campuses. (https://twitter.com/skepticalbrotha/status/1674450921458221058?t=bpe9hg9sH2nx1HZwcuGgcg&s=03)

  256. 256.

    Bupalos

    @MisterDancer: First I think your replies on this are generally are very thoughtful and well put.

    But I think everyone is jumping to insist Will has “proposals” and that they entail “abandoning” blacks and so forth. I don’t really see where, I think that’s been written in for him between the “fuck off” and “get lost” and “sacrifice negroes” Jackalism. I wonder the extent to which it stems from an idea that making strong unambiguous statements of support is somewhere between the thing that matters most and all that really matters.

    I think Will is talking about how we achieve a political result or don’t achieve a political result. This began and seems to me to be a conversation about effective communication within the framework of our values to create solidarity through those values. I don’t take him to be saying we deny this is racism or cooperate with it. I take him to be saying we don’t shout “racism” in the face of the racists and think we’re done, or that it accomplishes more good than harm. Everyone seems to want to make it an issue of either pandering to or offending racists. That’s really not the question. You make a solid point about the neccessity to sometimes drawing bright dividing lines with our values. But we’re mistaken if we think those bright lines themselves operate politically, or do any more to keep “our people” in than they do to keep “their people” out. My beef is that everyone seems to see this as primarily a matter of drawing lines, when it’s a really a matter of changing people.

    Though I never get in more trouble here than when I suggest people can change, and that it’s our job to try.

  257. 257.

    Geminid

    @Tony Jay:

     

    @Matt McIrvin: Your appraisal of the Democratic Party today reminded me of the one Rachel Bitecofer made just before the midterms:

       Gonna tell you that I’ve NEVER seen every part of the Left’s coalition, from Yellow Dogs to progressives, rowing in the same direction [before] and it gives me so much hope for 2024.

    @RachelBitecofer  November 5 2022.

  258. 258.

    geg6

    @Kay: ​
     
    Nor do the connections made seem to be super valuable (with a minute number of exceptions) for anyone not already an “elite.” Our alumni association is the largest in the entire world. Our students are considered by employers to be some of the most prepared for employment in their industries in the nation. Unless you’re looking to head up a hedge fund or clerk for some wingnut federal judge, you’re better off at Penn State (even considering that we are one of the most expensive public schools in the nation). We cost vastly less, have a ton more alumni in hiring positions around the world and our graduates are sought after by employers across the nation. Even on my small campus (600 students), more than 1/3 had been offered a job before the end of the fall semester of their senior year and well over 2/3 had a job before graduation in May.

  259. 259.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Will: You are saying that your in-laws are incredibly racist towards black people, and you are also saying that most Asians and Indians think like they do. And we have to pander to them to keep our coalition. We only have your word for it.

    For all we know that’s probably how you think, not them.

  261. 261.

    rikyrah

    Uppity Faerie Gothmother of Metal and #TeamOrca (@FountainPenDiva) tweeted at 0:50 PM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    I guess the recent college cheating scandal didn’t factor into today’s SCOTUS decision.

    I know it’s my own belief, but I’ve always felt the current ramped-up attacks on affirmative action stemmed from having a two term Black president who attended Ivy League schools.

     

     

    Uppity Faerie Gothmother of Metal and #TeamOrca (@FountainPenDiva) tweeted at 0:50 PM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
    It’s like they thought “oh shit, we really gotta stop those n*ggers from getting educated!”

    Thing is, they’ve been attacking public education for that very reason, and for a VERY long time.

    An educated Black person is dangerous to white supremacy. And Obama made them lose
    (https://twitter.com/FountainPenDiva/status/1674475422485204993?t=iMgweNKTqPAZyWV3UQUnpw&s=03)

  262. 262.

    Kent

    @geg6:Nor do the connections made seem to be super valuable (with a minute number of exceptions) for anyone not already an “elite.” Our alumni association is the largest in the entire world. Our students are considered by employers to be some of the most prepared for employment in their industries in the nation. Unless you’re looking to head up a hedge fund or clerk for some wingnut federal judge, you’re better off at Penn State (even considering that we are one of the most expensive public schools in the nation). We cost vastly less, have a ton more alumni in hiring positions around the world and our graduates are sought after by employers across the nation. Even on my small campus (600 students), more than 1/3 had been offered a job before the end of the fall semester of their senior year and well over 2/3 had a job before graduation in May.

    That is ABSOLUTELY the case in every part of the country.

    Here in Washington you are probably BETTER OFF applying to most jobs with a UW or WSU degree than one from say Dartmouth.  In Texas you are better off with a UT or A&M degree than one from Cornell.  etc. etc.

    Ivy League degrees are mostly about achieving success in the DC-NYC-Boston corridor.  Which yes, if you want to work for a white shoe law firm in DC or NYC, or in Wall Street finance, then yes, get an Ivy League degree.  But if you want to work an ordinary professional life anywhere else in the US, your flagship in-state school is often the BETTER choice.

  263. 263.

    schrodingers_cat

    @rikyrah:I know it’s my own belief, but I’ve always felt the current ramped-up attacks on affirmative action stemmed from having a two term Black president who attended Ivy League schools.

     

    Bingo.

  264. 264.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Alison Rose:

    My ex was a college soccer player. So basically I should be president of FIFA. 

    I wish this wasn’t too long to nominate! 🤣

  265. 265.

    Captain C

    @Steeplejack:

    Now eagerly awaiting the logical next step—banning legacy admissions.

    Not that it’ll ever happen, but places like Harvard and other such schools with hedge fund-sized endowments really are at a point where they can tell a donor that his worthless son, Indolent B. Turdworth IV, is not getting in no matter how many Turdworth Halls have been funded.

  267. 267.

    Brachiator

    @Kent:

    Why does this happen?  Partly it is parental expectations.

    Also, from my school days, I recall that many kids had extra burdens. They missed school because they had to work or watch siblings while their parents worked. Or their home lives were chaotic. I knew some kids who moved multiple times during a semester, including stints of staying with relatives because their parents could not afford the rent.

    Or they had to do homework at a friend’s house or at the library because the electricity had been turned off at home.

    And at one of my former schools, I don’t know what happened to the teachers and administrators. When my generation attended, most teachers were supportive and caring. But in later years I would hear stories about how too many teachers had given up or plain did not care and were not afraid to let the kids know how they felt.

    To be clear, there were still teachers who were worth their wait in gold.

  268. 268.

    rikyrah

    @mrmoshpotato:

    @rikyrah: “The Supreme Court is on the ballot.”

    -Hillary Rodham Clinton 2016

    Hillary is far better than me. I would only be seen on camera wearing a t-shirt that said

     

    I WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. 

  269. 269.

    MisterDancer

    @Bupalos: I think Will is talking about how we achieve a political result or don’t achieve a political result.

    Look. Honest truth: I pied him after that sexual assault comment. As noted above, this isn’t my 1st engagement with Will. I’ve given him a lot of rope now, and you’ll notice he hasn’t even tried to engage me in an actual discussion on this topic.

    If you claim to want to reason, and people offer to reason, but all you do is drop one or two lines at the angry folx? Then you can’t claim high ground, now can you?

    So there’s that, as a start. Then there’s what I recall set me off — his insistence that the Democratic Party pander to certain kinds of Bigotry, and stop telling people they are being racist because it’s pushing them to the GOP. And that he knows this because he hears it from his wife’s family.

    If I misunderstood, there were chances for him — not you, Will — to clarify his intent. And that’s OK! I’ve had to eat my own crow here, before, and will in future.

    But he didn’t do that. If he wants to critique comms, he needs to at least be able to articulate and accept pushback. He chose differently, again, and I’ve chose to close off that source of discussion going forward, because two rounds have shown he’s not here to discuss, he’s here to browbeat and inflame because this group does what this group does all the damn time.

    So yeah, I and other 100% took what he said as “drop the Blacks for Asians”. And aside from thru you? He’s not done anything to actually clarify and extend his original remarks.

    Done a lot to yell back, though. Great look, giving all the legitimate grieving and pain going around, right now.

  270. 270.

    Tony Jay

    @MisterDancer:

      I don’t think it’s working out even short-term for them. Much less if they ever manage to get back into power, and have to pay back all the crap promises they are making right now.

    Oh it’s working out great for them in that their main aim and absolute obsession is to purge the Parliamentary Party of any ideological bent that’s not ‘Power, Money, Prestige Über Alles’ and actually repel any member who might have a sliver of socialism in their soul. Their guiding light is ensuring that however badly they do in elections and however much of the Labour Party base they drive away, they will never, ever, ever risk losing control of the Party like they did in 2015/6.

    Their eventual election manifesto is going to be virtually indistinguishable from Cameron’s 2010 Tory offering, which is ideologically where the Labour Right want to be. And when they inevitably lose a lot of Labour votes over it, they think they’ll still win the election because the Tories are so very toxic, and then they can just go on the BBC and say how this proves that all of those voters who abandoned them must have been lingering antisemites who they’re to be applauded for driving away and replacing with decent, hard-working, ex-Tories.

    They have the political nous of chalkboard cladding and the integrity of Titan submarines, but when it comes to cynical, vengeful spite, they’re top of the class.

  271. 271.

    Kent

    @Brachiator: Yes, all of that is very much true.  HOWEVER…

    Those social factors are FAR more important in determining the success of poor and minority children than affirmative action at elite highly-selective universities, and

    There is FAR FAR more that we as a society could be doing to assist and counter balance the sort of social factors you are describing.

    Affirmative action is a very tiny band-aid.  We should be doing things like subsidized preschool so kids aren’t forced to stay home to take care of young siblings, after-school programs to keep kids engaged in school, etc.  With time any teacher could generate a list a hundred-items long

    Also to be clear, this is mostly a poverty thing, not a race thing.  The white kids I have from messed up poor families are just as struggling and lost as any of the Black or Hispanic kids.

  272. 272.

    mrmoshpotato

    @lollipopguild: Possibly.  Also, it’s not like the orange shitstain hired people who would work to improve anything.  Easy street just letting things be or helping/letting them crumble.

  273. 273.

    Will

    @schrodingers_cat: I didn’t say most Indian Americans and Chinese Americans are racist, I said a lot of them have views that could be considered such. I don’t think white Americans came up with the whole BMW phrase and gave it to the Indian American community. They came up with it themselves. I also said in a lot of communities, like the Indian one, a lot of families were for this being overturned. I didn’t say pander to them, I said screaming in their face that this decision is racist when they don’t think it is, isn’t the right strategy.

    What happened next is the same thing that happens almost all the time. Because I didn’t say something exactly as you want to hear it or said that hey there are other people out there thinking differently, you all start name calling and subscribing beliefs to people that they don’t hold. This behavior is something you all are proud of, call yourselves Jackals while doing the whole high school lunch room “OHHHHH” routine and air high fiving each other.

    This is a great blog, comment section not so much.

  274. 274.

    Tony Jay

    @geg6:

    Well maybe you’re just not making the effort to get out there and mix with really racist people of Indian and Chinese heritage.

    Have you considered downloading GOPindr?

  276. 276.

    rikyrah

    @schrodingers_cat:

    It just enrages me.

    Just like those who actually think there were no qualified Black folks in anything before Brown v Board was decided.

    Um, no.

     

    There is a reason why, in the Black community, there’s a saying.

    ” There were PhD’s at the Post Office.”

    Because, literally, there were people with PhD’s working at the Post Office.

    Not because they weren’t talented enough to get a teaching job..

    But, DESPITE them going through everything that it took to get a PhD…

     

    THEY WERE BLACK and couldn’t get a position no matter how brilliant they were.

    They had to eat and have a roof over their heads, so they went and got a job at the Post Office.

    I had an Aunt who had two degrees in chemistry. Complete geek. Wanted nothing more than spend her life in a lab doing research.

     

    SHE.WAS.A.BLACK.WOMAN.

    So, she went into one of the two fields open to Black women: education, social work.

    She became a teacher.

     

    My father was one of the smartest men I ever knew. Brilliant at math. Got a college degree in Math. Went on to take the CPA exam and scored in the top 1%

     

    NONE OF IT MATTERED.

    He was Black man born in a certain time.

    And, thus, his options for employment were narrow.

    Because of his standing as a Veteran, he was able to get a job at the VA.

     

    The delusional era of Mad Men. White men weren’t so successful because they were so great.

    They were never big fish in a big pond.

    They were small fish in a pond where everyone else was trapped in sardine cans and weren’t allowed to swim in the pond and compete.

  277. 277.

    Tony Jay

    @Geminid:

    To get rid of Trump the leadership of the Democratic Party moved Left and treated every strand of the Party with respect.

    To get rid of the Party leadership the Labour Right helped elect Johnson and has since treated most strands of the Party with unbridled contempt.

    I prefer your way.

  278. 278.

    Will

    @MisterDancer: I don’t have all day to sit on a comment section and go back forth. I’ve already wasted time that I should have spent on work cause I let myself get upset over someone being a judgmental asshole about my wife. I’m more than willing to engage in honest discussions, but I go downhill quick with the “fuck off” and “let’s compare trauma” people. They anger me and I end up focusing on responding to them rather than real discussion.

  279. 279.

    Brachiator

    @Roger Moore:

    RE: Except that the vast majority of sports teams at elite college campuses are comprised of sports like lacrosse and swimming and sailboating. You know, white people sports.

    Yes, and those sports tend to be subsidized by the big money from football and basketball, which are much browner.  It’s one more way White people are able to profit at BIPOC people’s expense.

    Many college sports excluded people of color at one time, so it is somewhat myopic to frame this in terms of white sports profiting at BIPOC people’s expense. And there are interesting outliers to the sports which have attracted notable people.

    Following his professional basketball career, Wilt Chamberlain played volleyball in the short-lived International Volleyball Association (IVA). He served one term as league president and is enshrined in the IVA Hall of Fame. He also played polo, tennis, paddle ball, and water skied.

    Jim Brown earned 10 varsity letters at Syracuse in four different sports (basketball, football, lacrosse, and track). Brown’s performance at Syracuse earned him a spot in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

  280. 280.

    greenergood

    @Will: I’m impressed that you think the sort of international relations between the US, China, India, et al. will still be functioning at the end of the next hundred years. I’m pretty much convinced we’ll be eating the last surviving sparrows skewered on rusting curtain rods under the last surviving bridges after the collapse of the infrastructure, bridges that  span water courses that have dried up permanently. That, of couse, is if you live inland. On the coasts, you’ve drowned … But then, I was never an optimist …

  283. 283.

    Kent

    @Brachiator: Not “white people sports”  Elite private prep school sports.

    I can guarantee you that largely white schools in coal mining country of Pennsylvania and West Virginia don’t have sailing, swimming, or lacrosse teams.

  284. 284.

    Ramona

    @Will: You misunderstood my question. I was asking how many US citizens of Indian origin do you know who are third generation US citizens. I daresay not any and the reason for that is because most people from the Indian subcontinent were not allowed to immigrate to the US until after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act which only the Civil Rights movement made possible.

    If you are not at least telling your in-laws that you disagree with them and that you hold their beliefs to be immoral, they will continue to believe they are justified in holding these beliefs. I know from experience that even being one of only two people who occasionally frowns and looks away or buffs out of the room when the family of my significant other start to bloviate self righteously about Fox propaganda. They know better than to make such comments in my presence and even having to be silent now and then puts some doubt in their minds about their worldview.

    Instead of striking back defensively at people here, why don’t you read up on the history of immigration law in this country and the next time you are in the company of your in-laws mention how you recently discovered the role that the Civil Rights Movement had in allowing Asians to come to the US. Talk of the inspiration MLK and others took from the Indian Satyagraha movement. Heck, show them pictures of Black Civil Rights leaders wearing Nehru topees.

    The alternative to sounding obnoxiously preachy when advocating a moral position is not silence but embarking on the painful process of learning how to speak up.

  285. 285.

    geg6

    @Kent: ​
     
    Yes. That’s what we do. But we look down on the test scores, honestly. When you look at who submits them, it’s not the kids from the economically stressed school districts. It’s the kids from the wealthy districts. Because the parents paid all that money for test prep! When you check the test scores against HSGPA, there is often a gap and sometimes that gap is huge. To us, motivation is the best factor for gauging success in college. And, in general, less wealthy and underrepresented students have a lot more motivation.

  286. 286.

    mrmoshpotato

    @rikyrah: She mentioned the Supreme Court on the campaign trail, so maybe a shirt reading TRUMP IS RACIST, FASCISTIC, TRAITOROUS TRASH.

    All true.  You are traitorous trash when you trash NATO and suck Kremlin asshole in 1987.

    Though, post-Dump, she was right about everything, proven by history.

  287. 287.

    cain

    @H.E.Wolf: this is correct – one thing that the court is doing is truly revealing the U.S. racism and our population is learning how racial things actually all.

    That means, like abortion case it perversely strengthen our hand – and get more people to the polls.

    I see our GOP is suddenly on the side of asian and south asian – yeah fuck them.

  288. 288.

    Kelly

    @geg6:  I myself have seen the vast discrepancies that used to happen between SAT/ACT scores and actual HS GPAs. And the even bigger discrepancies of the scores against their GPAs here.

    I had a middling GPA at a not at all challenging small town high school. My graduating class was 111 students. Always had a knack for multiple choice tests. Killed the SAT. SAT score led University of Oregon admissions to try to sign me up for the Honors Program. I declined. Struggled thru my Computer Science Bachelors. Had a solid career in IT. Comfortably retired now.

  289. 289.

    Freemark

    @Will: ​
     

    The problem is the family and people you are talking about are severely racist. And then you are like ‘don’t drive them to the GOP’. We aren’t driving them to the GOP any more than we are the racist Bubba on food stamps and disability. He votes GOP because of his racism and no amount of pandering is going to change that. You are essentially saying we should accept their deeply held god awful racists beliefs in order to get their vote. Fuck that!

  290. 290.

    Will

    @Ramona: We’ve tangled for sure. I don’t back down to their bullshit as I don’t back down to bullshit anywhere. When I finally learned what the BMW thing was I called them out on it. I said they wouldn’t be laughing if my white ass said our immigration policy should be no BMI, no Blacks, no Muslims, no Indians. You could have heard crickets, and I’m not talking about the game.

    When you say most weren’t allowed, I assume exceptions were made? I will admit my understanding was based on that where I grew up there was an Indian family with deep roots that had lived there longer than when my family moved to the area around the 1940s. Because of that I assumed it wasn’t an issue for them. I was aware of the issue with Chinese immigrants as white Americans of the time were afraid they were going to take over the west coast.

  291. 291.

    Roger Moore

    @geg6:

    The gaming of the tests made them less than useless.

    Yeah, this is a huge point.  Goodhart’s Law (“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”) is especially true of high-stakes testing.  Not to mention that standardized tests have all kinds of inherent flaws that made them of questionable utility even before people started trying to game them.

  292. 292.

    Ramona

    @Alison Rose: Darn! I wish I had continued to read that hateful sack of shit’s message instead of immediately responding to his deliberate misreading of my question.

    How DARE he say you are on a “persecution kick”!

    “Hateful sack of shit” is too kind an epithet for “Will”!

  293. 293.

    jimmiraybob

    “…straight-up white supremacy in action.”

    There were some hints….Kill woke! …Kill diversity! …Kill equity! …Kill inclusion! It doesn’t get much louder or clearer without actually mentioning the hangin’ tree.

  294. 294.

    Kent

    @Ramona: 14% of India is Muslim. Your in-laws are way bigoted. If you are not at least telling them that you disagree with them and that you hold their beliefs to be immoral, they will continue to believe they are justified in holding these beliefs.

    Are Hindus and Muslims in India different races?  different cultures?  or different religions?

    Are Amish, Hascdic Jews, Muslims, or Mormons bigots for wanting their children to marry within their faiths?

  295. 295.

    Tony Jay

    @Will:

    Well, it’s like this:

    When you say

    I didn’t say most Indian Americans and Chinese Americans are racist, I said a lot of them have views that could be considered such.

    That is calling them racist, because having the views and biases you ascribe to them (well, to your in-laws, but you’re the one using them to stereotype whole Asian communities) is racism. People are responding to what you’re telling them.

    Like when you say:

    I don’t think white Americans came up with the whole BMW phrase and gave it to the Indian American community. They came up with it themselves.

    You’re calling them racists. That’s what that is.

    And when you say:

    I also said in a lot of communities, like the Indian one, a lot of families were for this being overturned.

    People have shown you electoral data that contradicts your claim that these communities have a problem with Democrats being the Party of equality and affirmative action. Your refusal, so far, to even acknowledge that your main claim has been judged, found lacking and rejected does not go over very well.

    And when you say:

    I didn’t say pander to them, I said screaming in their face that this decision is racist when they don’t think it is, isn’t the right strategy.

    This will obviously raise hackles, because of the aforementioned data points contradicting your main claim about how these communities actually feel about this topic, and because it’s just such an ugly way of portraying support for the gains of the civil rights movement that it verges on that old wingnut staple of “shoving X down our throats!” Pushback is to be expected.

    And when you say:

     you all start name calling and subscribing beliefs to people that they don’t hold.

    The name-calling is in direct response to the fact that the beliefs you are claiming your in-laws hold are very, very racist. And they call them those names because the people on this blog are (mostly) Democrats. And to circle back around to your original claim, Democrats don’t pussyfoot around where racism is concerned, they just call it racism.

    Because they’re Democrats.

    I hope that helps.

  296. 296.

    geg6

    @Kent: ​
     
    They definitely have swimming. I swam in high school and, for a short time, in college. I’m from Western PA and went to school at Pitt. We swam against WVU.

  299. 299.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    To get rid of Trump the leadership of the Democratic Party moved Left and treated every strand of the Party with respect.

    There were a lot of people who held their nose and voted for Biden. And many of the progressive usual suspects are right back to “no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats,” and “the Democratic Party is nothing but corporate Democrats.”

    These idiots will have to be roped in again in 2024.

    I know that the situation is complicated, but I keep hearing some of the same “Labour and Tory, no difference” stuff that I hear about Democrats. Maybe it’s true. But I also see the right wing media ready to pounce on Labour about anything, in order to brand them as illegitimate and unworthy. And supposedly less rabid media organizations like the BBC happily go along. The bullshit over director Ken Loach is a recent example.

    And I am an ignorant Yank, but even I see Starmer do and say stupid shit.

    But damn, I still see ordinary people in the UK in interviews insist that half the immigrants coming into the UK immediately go on benefits while the other half take jobs away from regular British people, and still believe that BREXIT will be their salvation. Meanwhile actual Tories do everything they can to screw over everyone who is not a donor or crony.

    So if I lived in the UK I would happily vote Labour. But I would be ready to create a new party if they failed to deliver. I would never vote for Tories as an answer to anything.

  300. 300.

    Martin

    So, one of the few things I’m an an expert on here.

    CA has been operating with race blind admissions at public universities since 1996. That was not quite my whole career, so I was involved in that transition to race blind admissions, and was involved in building a system that could address those challenges over the next twenty-odd years. My particular focus during that time was building policies that both improved representation of minority populations and did so in ways that resulted in students graduating. We didn’t measure success by how many we admitted, but by how many we graduated, so it incorporated programs to retain students as well, special educational programs if those students needed, them, and so on.

    So, bottom line this does make things MUCH harder. However, it is far from impossible *and* you get a lot of benefits by doing that work. So, how did we focus on this:

    1. You rely on the continuing effects of housing and labor segregation in the US. California has some of the most diverse communities in the US, but by and large is still quite segregated – Oakland has black people, Bakersfield has latinos, just to irresponsibly stereotype. You make geographic representation an important part of your formula. High school populations are extremely representative of the race mix in the state, provided that you have high levels of high school completion (and from the perspective of a university it doesn’t matter because that completion is a prerequisite, so it’s actually perfectly representative in terms of who is qualified to go to college).

      Now, each high school has its own racial mix, and there are certain to be racial biases in that graduating class. We still have major problems with women not taking AP computer science, and black students not taking certain AP categories that are almost certainly not entirely driven by student preference. Students get encouraged to take those and there is bias in which students are encouraged. But, school districts are also pretty highly segregated. There is a pretty fucking bright line between the nearly 100% latino high school one city over and the nearly 100% white/asian high school in the same school district. And more often than not, this is how school districts look. So, if you adopt a policy whereby you will serve the top 10% of every high school in the state, you will get pretty darn close to restoring a certain racial mix, especially if that policy is enforced in the model.

      (An aside, the ‘model’ is how students are actually admitted. It’s not the tv representation of 3 faculty members sitting around a table of files choosing which 5 to take. It’s a matrix of an enormous number of variables on each student – some from the application, some from the reads of that application, etc. that gets thrown into a statistical model that predicts if we admit according to these few dozen rules, we will have an admit pool that looks like X and projecting how likely each student is to accept that offer based on another giant statistical model, an entering class that looks like Y. And you look to see if X and Y match the mission, and the desired outcomes – because you need to meet per major or per college enrollment targets in there, you can’t break the financial aid pot of money in there, you can’t fuck up housing, and on and on. It’s an absurdly complex multivariate statistical problem to solve especially when you’ve got 120,000 applications for 5,000 seats to fill, and each of those 120,000 applications needs to be read twice and you have from Dec 1 to Jan 31 to do it.)

    2. Within here are other opportunities. If you are treating your pool as one monolithic mass, you will reinforce the biases built into state funding models and so on. So you don’t do that. You do evaluation in the local context. How strong a student is not based on how they stack up against all 120,000 other students, but against all other students *from their high school*. The top student at the worst school in the state is going to look just as strong as the top student from the best – at least in the measures that are most heavily weighed in the model. This creates a weird dynamic for the public where moving heaven and earth to put your kid in the most competitive school is kind of a bad idea if your goal is to game the admissions process. You generally want to keep your kid in your local school. This also then turns into an indirect mechanism to help level school funding since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to outrun our models through overfunding the top schools. So, assuming you are getting students from these largely segregated schools in roughly proportionate numbers, you’ve now set up a model that will want to admit them in a roughly proportionate way. You’ve built a relatively race sensitive model that can’t see race because you’re exploiting all of the existing social mechanisms that tend to segregate students. But this can be improved upon.
    3. Within this you will have diverse schools where students may sort internally. You see this here in CA most pronounced in latino communities where poverty is the driving factor and where kids need to work, which undermines their academic opportunities – mostly in the ag communities. So you further expand the model to account for those opportunities – you recognize in the read that this is a student that needed to work. You can still use household income in the model. Income is not a great proxy for race, but if you’re helping *any* low income student regardless of race, you’re doing something that is beneficial to the state in the manner that a public university is supposed to be doing. So you help a bunch of poor white or asian kids – that’s OKAY!   So you do things like de-emphasizing the impact of AP and honors courses, you nuke the SAT from orbit, and on and on. Things that are long proven to correlate better with race or income than with academic outcomes in college. Now there are benefits in the SAT – but as a threshold function, not a linear one. If you have very low SATs, you probably aren’t academically prepared. But if you have moderate SATs, you’re fine. The performance difference of students in college from a 500 to an 800 is too small to measure. But it falls off HARD below that 500. So as long as everyone did okay, they’re safe to admit. And if they didn’t do okay, you’re looking for other evidence that they will be safe to admit. Losing that in the SAT is hard, but that’s really all the SAT was ever good for. It made the job a little easier, especially at the scale we operated at. The AP kids still get some benefit, but it’s not as strong as they think. You factor other things out – the Korean kids that took AP Korean and got a 5. No shit, you speak it at home. Nobody take AP Korean if they aren’t already pretty fluent in Korean – it’s a dumb test.
    4. And then around this you recognize that you’re going to take some students that aren’t well prepared and you build programs to help them out, because yeah, everyone on paper might only care about who you admitted, but eventually the community figures out that sending your black kid to this college doesn’t result in a rewarding experience and a degree. And that gets around. One racist frat event will cut your black acceptance rate by 20% at least. Community perceptions aren’t always right, but they tend to be more right than institutions want to admit. So you have to build the back-end to get those low income kids through and the minorities and everyone else. If they don’t make it, the whole process fails.

    So, how did we do? We did okay. The biggest disappointment was black student representation. Now, my institution was in a place where black and latino people don’t live. So we’re already in trouble, because black and latino students usually don’t feel comfortable there. Lots of programs to build mentorship with black staff and faculty, student groups, etc. They help, but it’s a lot of work to connect to all of those students and if your hiring practices aren’t focused on a diverse workforce, all you do is burn out the handful of black and latino employees you have.

    We were more successful getting latino numbers closer to representation. We couldn’t get to the high school graduation population balance, but we did improve upon the balance in our applicant pool. Basically if you applied, you were a little more likely than the overall population to get in and to enroll. The black population was hard for a different reason. We hit that goal in terms of admitting students, but getting them enrolled we never got that close to – due to a different dynamic – there is scholarship money for relatively high achieving black students from private universes. We couldn’t afford to compete with that so they’d get full rides to USC or wherever and they took the full ride (plus USC is in a community that tends to look more like the community those students came from). Good for them. But it really made it hard to build momentum around making the place more representative.

    Where we really succeeded was in the low income category. We were the top university for Pell grant recipients by a pretty wide margin. We were top in terms of raising students out of poverty. We were top in terms of relative earnings between graduate and their parents (similar measure). And we were near the top in terms of value – student out of pocket+loan load relative to earnings. Pell grant helping us on that one. Our average student loan load at graduation was $18K. Not ‘free college for all’ territory, but well below the national average and generally pretty manageable provided you land in a place with cheaper housing than the city you went to college in. And those recognitions helped to inform the public that we were open to students from all over the state and they should apply, and so that helped with the race makeup over time.

    We also roughly doubled the graduation rate of the at-risk student pool, and brought black/latino graduation rates within the margin of error of white/asian rates. Low income still fell a little short but that was not due to academic performance but some students simply needing to drop out in order to work and support their parents. We had some programs to help with that, but it’s a really, really hard problem to solve for a university.

    So, bottom line – public universities can overcome this. It will take a lot of effort but there is a road map everyone can follow.

    Now, the macro impact. This is tricky. If a private wants to keep admitting the pool of students they always did, they’ll be able to keep doing that no problem. Harvard can continue to target the constellation of prep schools around the country and pick off all the trust fund babies. Privates generally also do in-person interviews of applicants, so race will be able to be evaluated with relative accuracy and incorporated into the model. You can’t ask the students race, but you can infer it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get an AI model in there to race identify students by name, address, etc. Gonzolez, Chang, Jefferson, Smith are not determinative of race, but I like those odds. You an also deduce it from the personal statement. A LOT of UC personal statements start out ‘As a black woman’. Ok. We didn’t ask. Thank you for the offer.

    The privates that have a harder time filling their classes may get better. They tend to not have the resources to interview, or to do some of what I described above (though the AI model will be dirt cheap once they show up in the wild) so their ability to pick off those black students with scholarships will be harder. But that probably means the publics will catch them. Net loss for some black students in terms of paying for college but probably no real change in access.

    In the end, the public universities like mine that really put effort into this are effectively building systemic tools to undo the systemic inequities in school funding, access to educational opportunities and so on. In some places this will improve things because you’ll have states systems that follow that same goal. In other places you won’t – but odds are those other places were never using affirmative action to help minorities anyway. There will be a good 5 years of complete chaos. I think the states with poor higher education systems will get worse, and the ones with good systems may not benefit but in relative terms will come out ahead.

    This is by no means a good outcome, but states that are trying will overcome it, and states that aren’t will fall further behind. Maybe that will trigger national action? Not sure.

  301. 301.

    Ramona

    @Will: Encouraging silence about racist rulings for political gain is insidiously racist.

    Perhaps, you might consider the possibility that you are insidiously bigoted against Black people.

  302. 302.

    Kent

    @geg6:Yes. That’s what we do. But we look down on the test scores, honestly. When you look at who submits them, it’s not the kids from the economically stressed school districts. It’s the kids from the wealthy districts. Because the parents paid all that money for test prep! When you check the test scores against HSGPA, there is often a gap and sometimes that gap is huge. To us, motivation is the best factor for gauging success in college. And, in general, less wealthy and underrepresented students have a lot more motivation.

    When my oldest daughter was in HS (and a pretty median student) I put her through two full SAT test prep classes and she took the SAT four separate times.   From memory her scores were like 1180, 1170, 1180, 1190 so after all of that she raised them 10 points.

    I think what you can do with SAT test prep is take bright students who might score a decent 1400 without coaching and teach them clever test-taking techniques to improve their scores to a 1450 or so on average through more efficient time management and understanding how questions are written.  But those techniques are less effective for more median students.

    Don’t believe the propaganda put out by test prep companies that they can consistently improve scores by 1000 points or more.  Those are mostly lies.

    And yes, wealthy districts have higher average SAT scores than poor districts.  But that isn’t due to test prep.  It is because they have higher reading and math skills to begin with for a whole lot of reasons

    I expect it is possible that you can find students with mediocre academic records for whatever social reasons, but who are super bright and can ace the SAT.  But those kids are probably rare as unicorns.

  303. 303.

    Brachiator

     

    @Will:

    I was aware of the issue with Chinese immigrants as white Americans of the time were afraid they were going to take over the west coast.

    Bullshit. There was never any chance of this happening. White bigots looked for all kinds of dumb ass reasons to hate Chinese immigrants. As with other groups, including ethnic whites, there is some level of visibility that results in awful acts of racial hatred.

  304. 304.

    Martin

    @Ramona: I will point out one specific subgroup – the northern CA Sikh community that immigrated to the US a good century ago when the central valley was building out agriculturally.

    CA is a bit of an outlier in that we have relatively old asian immigrant groups from India and China and Japan that were the ones that triggered that clampdown on immigration, and a lot of the communities here immigrated illegally because enforcement was so difficult way out here.

    But these are the exceptions that prove the rule, so your argument is well taken.

  306. 306.

    geg6

    @Kent: ​ 
    Dude, I’ve been in higher ed for 25 years. No one thinks less of test prep providers than I do. What I’m saying is that many privileged kids do not bother to work up to their potential, which is what these tests supposedly measure. Motivation is a better measure than any of these tests.

    I’m certainly not cheerleading or believing in any of the propaganda for test prep. I think it’s a total ripoff, just as paying for scholarship searches is a ripoff. But the parents paid for the prep and, dammit, they insist it should be part of the process. And I have never seen a SAT score improve by more than 10-20 points. Ever. But I have seen plenty of high SAT/ACT scores from students of privilege (because they have had an excellent education before they were even born) who can’t be bothered to work in high school or college up to the level that the SAT/ACT indicates the student can. Standardized tests are garbage. Just total garbage. And I say this having always had ridiculously high standardized test scores. I admit that I’m just not all that smart, but you’d never know it by looking at my scores. I’m good at testing. And even better once I learned game theory well enough to use it.​

  307. 307.

    Martin

    @Kent: I can counter that with actual data. We know from a variety of sources including our own applicants that in most cases test prep courses are good for 20-30 points. More with a private tutor.

    But the impact of that is not linear. You get a pretty normal distribution of SAT scores so if you are boosting your way up to the mean, it opens a LOT of schools up, even with just 20-30 points. If you are boosting above the mean, it starts to unlock that next tier of school – from a CSU to a UC, or a UC to some privates.

    The biggest problem students face (much bigger problem with male students than female students) is matching their academic standing with the appropriate tiers of schools. Men are MUCH more likely to look at the ‘you’re a strong candidate for a CSU’ and reject that and only apply to UC and then get locked out, denied everywhere. Happens a LOT.  Sometimes those 20-30 points really helps to pull male students in particular into better alignment. The test prep usually pays off better for male students because they tend to have worse study habits. Female students are more likely to do that prep on their own so the prep didn’t really help them in a new way.

    Good tutors are better because they can identify what concepts you are missing that will get that next set of scores and help you learn them. Most inexpensive prep courses can’t do that.

  308. 308.

    Chris Johnson

    WOOF, this comments section.

    I am just reminded that what really won the 2016 election was the skill of Russian propagandists in getting us to fight ourselves, through exploiting cracks in the coalitions.

    Can’t think why I’m reminded so strongly of this right now. One would think the people working on that had other things to preoccupy them right now. Their echoes persist today.

    I’m with Tony Jay on this. Vent and then get back on the damn barricades. We’re not done.

  309. 309.

    Bupalos

    @James E Powell: Are we disputing that  the democratic party has seen slippage with hispanics and blacks even as we faced a thing like Trump? I mean, I’ll go research and post if people think this is controversial.

  310. 310.

    Roger Moore

    @geg6:

    To up my GRE scores, I got a book on game theory in test taking and used it before taking the test.

    Yes, standardized tests are easily gamed.  There are all kinds of tricks to doing well on multiple choice tests, and people who know them will do significantly (both statistically and practically) better.  I remember when I was a kid someone bought me a book full of important real-life multiple choice tests- things like professional licensing exams- and I was able to pass a lot of them just by knowing how to take multiple choice tests without needing to know the subject material.

  311. 311.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @rikyrah: Yup.  Not only did Harriot not vote for Hillary, he tweeted out a list of alternate candidates on the day of the 2016 election because ha-ha, isn’t the prospect of the loss of Roe and Affirmative Action and whatever else this Trump Court can do to America, funny?

    What makes it worse is that he knows damn well the history of White Supremacy in America (and how people voting responsibly has been the biggest threat to it) as well as the importance of the Supreme Court.  In the biggest, most important election of our lifetimes, an election that Conservatives rightly viewed as a possible death blow to White Supremacy if SCOTUS continued towards the Left, Harriot did no better than my white Libertarian relatives who voted for Gary Johnson because while they loathed Trump they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary.  If my relatives threw women, Black People, LGBTQ People, Undocumented People etc., under the bus then so did Harriot.  Plain and simple.  And he has NEVER done ANY of the things he demands from other people (admit it, apologize, pledge to do better etc.) when they fuck up.

  312. 312.

    Ramona

    @Bupalos: Your thoughtful comments here and Will’s unnuanced statements seem to not take into account that there is a hierarchy of minorities with Black people perceived as being at the bottom. All other minorities can aspire to achieving Whiteness as did the Irish and Italians and even if they don’t, they can comfort themselves like the lowliest White in LBJ’s account that at least they are not Black. This way of thinking cannot be permitted to stand. Catering to such thinking is insidious. Black people have long been owed an elevation to their true status as equal human beings. Bear in mind that India has a millennia of history of casteism and relegating Black people to the bottom is a contemporary implementation of caste. If the US does not watch out, it shall replicate the most horrendous feature of Indian society.

  313. 313.

    Will

    @Ramona: I didn’t encourage silence, I said screaming in another minority’s face that this is racism when they don’t think it is, isn’t a good strategy. There has to be a better way to communicate.

    I also didn’t deliberately misread your question. I said it was a good one because it made me think. Outside of the Indian American family in my old hometown, none of the older ones I’ve met would have been here before 1965.

    Call me an asshole, but Alison Rose was being a complete asshole and tried to use the Holocaust as a reason why we should reject someone cause of their parents. If she said that shit out loud in any modern corporation, she’d be fired, rightly. It was wrong thing to say and quite frankly starting those compare trauma arguments to try and excuse bad behavior is wrong.

     

    @Brachiator: Yeah, no shit it was ever going to happen. Well aware white people have looked for excuses for their blatant racism since the dawn of time.

  314. 314.

    Martin

    @geg6: SATs are pretty garbage apart from that very coarse threshold function I indicated above (and which can be done with a bit more effort without the SATs, so no big loss there), but APs aren’t – at least AP STEM and language courses, APUSH, a few others. They are quite good at identifying subject matter mastery of prerequisite content if you focus on scores of 4 and 5 where you will have subsequent college content that relies on that knowledge.

    Integrating those students into the curriculum is tricky, and there are a bunch of pitfalls for students that have gaps of time between when they studied AP Chem and when they are expected to recall it, etc. but having a standard baseline exam with content that we can examine is extremely helpful to designing curriculum around. I wish we had non-AP courses that were as useful for a variety of non-college level topics – writing and most STEM subjects. The SATs are in no way useful for any of those.

    Having advised school districts in math curriculum, the AP courses serve as good mile markers for where students in precalc, etc. should be at the end of those courses, but it means everything else is getting pulled this way and that, with pretty bad results overall.

    I don’t really want a test there so much as I want a proper assessment process for the schools around some established (national, state, etc.) standards that can help guide and inform these schools better than the national testing schemes we employ do. Because the testing just creates a whole other set of bad incentives. A good assessment program can do wonders. But it’s expensive to do well.

  315. 315.

    Brachiator

    @Ramona:

    From a couple of Internet links:

    Indian Immigrants to the US

    The earliest recorded Indian emigrant to the United States was from Madras, who traveled to Massachusetts in 1790. A number of Indians were brought to the United States by seafaring Captains who worked for the East India Company to serve in their households as servants.

    More formal immigration to the United States from India started in the early 19th century when Indian immigrants began settling in communities along the West Coast. Although they originally arrived in small numbers, new opportunities arose in middle of the 20th century, and the population grew larger in following decades.

    The first wave of Indian immigrants found work mainly in the agriculture, lumber, and railroad industries. Although their presence remained relatively small through the early the 20th century, they and other non-European migrants were the target of a series of laws in 1917, 1921, and 1924, which, among other exclusionary measures, eventually banned Indian immigrants altogether. While the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 established a yearly quota of 100 Indian immigrants, it was the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that removed national-origin quotas altogether, paving the way for non-European arrivals. Educational exchange programs, new temporary visas for highly skilled workers, and expanded employment-based immigration channels opened pathways for highly skilled and educated Indian immigrants, many of whom brought family. From 1980 to 2019, the Indian immigrant population in the United States increased 13-fold.

  316. 316.

    Kent

    @geg6:

    @Kent: ​
    Dude, I’ve been in higher ed for 25 years. No one thinks less of test prep providers than I do. What I’m saying is that many privileged kids do not bother to work up to their potential, which is what these tests supposedly measure. Motivation is a better measure than any of these tests.

    I’m certainly not cheerleading or believing in any of the propaganda for test prep. I think it’s a total ripoff, just as paying for scholarship searches is a ripoff. But the parents paid for the prep and, dammit, they insist it should be part of the process. And I have never seen a SAT score improve by more than 10-20 points. Ever. But I have seen plenty of high SAT/ACT scores from students of privilege (because they have had an excellent education before they were even born) who can’t be bothered to work in high school or college up to the level that the SAT/ACT indicates the student can. Standardized tests are garbage. Just total garbage. And I say this having always had ridiculously high standardized test scores. I admit that I’m just not all that smart, but you’d never know it by looking at my scores. I’m good at testing. And even better once I learned game theory well enough to use it.​

    I don’t think we disagree.

    I’m just saying that kids from wealthy zip codes do better on average on the SAT than kids from poor zip codes not because of test prep.  But for a whole lot of other reasons including the fact that they are generally getting better K-12 education and developing better academic skills than kids in poor zip codes.

    Two separate issues:  (1) Is the SAT a good predictor of future success in college?  No, absolutely not, except at the coarsest level.  (2) Do average SAT scores reflect actual educational discrepancies between poor and wealthy school districts and zip codes?  Yes, absolutely.  You can do a regression analysis of average SAT scores and neighborhood wealth for any state in the country and it will show statistically significant results.

  317. 317.

    Ramona

    @Will: that is good that you pushed back. Now, we Jackals have given you more ammo: e.g. 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act.

    I think you owe Alison Rose an apology for the “persecution kick” remark.

    And I doubt your wife will appreciate your divulging traumatic experiences in semi public but you know her better than I do.

  319. 319.

    Another Scott

    @rikyrah:

    or related to staff

    My mom was a secretary at my private college. Unionized by the Teamsters. One of her benefits being unionized was full tuition for her child (me) who attended there.

    Yeah, it was a huge benefit and great for me, but it was part of her compensation package. (I was offered admission before she got the job there – she was looking to make a new start, too.)

    Mixing university staff benefits in with donor legacies seems a bit apples-and-oranges to me. But I concede the larger point that the idea that college admissions and aid are (or that they somehow should be) based purely on the individual student performance on various metrics (and not also based on who they are and where they’re from and their life experiences, what they want to do, and how they can enrich campus life for other students and the university as a whole) has never been the case. Universities and colleges are always selective and “qualified” people are always turned down.

    The SCOTUS monsters want to turn back the clock and erase history, and for us to thank them for it.  Grr…

    Fight for 15!!

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  320. 320.

    Martin

    @Kent: Two separate issues:  (1) Is the SAT a good predictor of future success in college?  No, absolutely not, except at the coarsest level.  (2) Do average SAT scores reflect actual educational discrepancies between poor and wealthy school districts and zip codes?  Yes, absolutely.  You can do a regression analysis of average SAT scores and neighborhood wealth for any state in the country and it will show statistically significant results.

    Yep to all of that.

  321. 321.

    Kent

    @Ramona: @Kent: does bigotry only count if it’s race-based?

    I’m not saying that at all.  I’m not religious and I’m as skeptical of religion as anyone and think religion is one of the biggest obstacles to progress everywhere you go in the planet.

    However if you are a devoutly religious person I think it is natural to want your children to follow in your footsteps.  If you are Catholic and want your children to marry within the church, that doesn’t mean you are bigoted towards Methodists or Baptists.  It just means you recognize (correctly) that if your children and grandchildren are going to remain within your faith then that is much more likely if they marry within it.

    Bigotry is a word with an actual meaning.  And when you get into the area of religion it doesn’t always apply in a straightforward way.  Unless you want to claim that all religion is simply bigotry and that all religious people (except for the most ecumenical like unitarian universalists) are by definition bigots.

  322. 322.

    Ramona

    @Martin: Wow! That’s great to know! Thanks! Do you know when and what prompted these Sikhs to come to California? BTW, Sikhs are a put-upon minority in India.

  323. 323.

    Soprano2

    @Will: Asians and Indian Anericans see themselves as white in some ways; eventually white people may see them that way too. Being “white” is a flexible status that only black people will never achieve.

  325. 325.

    Soprano2

    @Will: I do have to say they will be surprised to find they still won’t all get into the Ivies based solely on their test scores.

  326. 326.

    Soprano2

    @Tom Levenson: But they don’t see it that way. They believe their superior test scores and GPA’s mean they should be first in line, and nothing else should be considered. They don’t care about population representation – they’d tell you it’s not their fault they’re smarter and do better in school, that those kids should just work harder.

  327. 327.

    Ksmiami

    @rikyrah: and in this scenario, everyone loses. The country goes on crushing dreams, losing the next inventor, or Dr, and we all end up poorer for it. The only reason our government should exist, its north star is to give every citizen a chance to go as far as they can, to live a decent life, to make things better and that is why the GOP shouldn’t even exist. Because the purpose of that party is to reward a few white men at the expense of everyone else.

  328. 328.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    There will always be ‘conscienceless objectors’ who make bank  – either financial or reputational – by being shitstirring fucks. Nothing you can do about them in the age of social media but point and laugh and consistently prove them wrong. But I was referring to the Left of the Dem Party itself, who as far as I can see have been brought into the loop and listened to and who have responded by being reliable votes when needed, cheerleaders when required and honest holdouts when possible. That’s how you keep a Big Tent party together and the Biden Era has been a great example of how that works in practice.

    That’s the polar opposite of what’s happened in the Labour Party, where the faction that openly and consistently sabotaged the fight against the Tories between 2015-2019 has taken total control over the Party and launched a sustained pogrom against their internal enemies. The pro-Tory media might have taken the odd potshot against them, but when it comes to their ruthless exploitation of Party machinery to suspend, expel, block, smear and bully thousands of popular leftwing incumbents and candidates from being able to stand for election, there’s been almost complete silence.

    When people say ‘Labour and Tories are the same’, what they’re saying is their leaderships are both dishonest thugs, and that Labour under Starmer have adopted policies, biases and terminology that only a decade ago were mainstream Toryism. When the Republicans went Right, the Democrats didn’t follow them, but over here as the Tories have gone Far Right, Nu- New Labour have sprinted to follow them.

    You mention Ken Loach, and that’s a great example. Loach, one of Britain’s finest directors and a fierce proponent of fairness and decency was expelled from the Labour Party for telling the truth about the vile campaign to paint Corbyn as antisemitic. Starmer’s goons didn’t have to do that, but they wanted to, and they did it with relish. Then they used the fact that a popular Labour Mayor had once interviewed Loach about his award winning film decrying hatred towards immigrants to block that mayor from standing as a Labour candidate.

    That’s who and what the current Labour leadership are. Ugly, lying, bullying authoritarians who consider the Party theirs and revel in the freedom the media gives them to stamp all over Party democracy, because while they’re punching Left, they’re careful to continually pander towards the type of racist, ignorant, Brexit-loving moron you mention, and refuse to challenge the media lies that keep Mr and Mrs Moron thick as pigshit and voting for their own misery.

    So while I’m voting Labour next election, that’s only because my MP is one of the decent ones they tried and failed to cheat out of his job. If they boot him to make way for a Starmerite drone who’ll happily vote through Tory-lite policies (and I fully expect them to) then they can screw themselves, I’m voting for someone else.

    They don’t want my vote. I’m not Tory enough.

  329. 329.

    Will

    @Alison Rose: I am sorry for what I said and how I said it and offending you. I am very defensive when I think people are slagging my wife. She’s one of the best souls on this planet and I lose my shit over her.

     

    @Ramona: My wife is open about the things she has experienced. She tries to help everyone. Part of that is telling people about what she has experienced and how we should endeavor for a better future for all.

  330. 330.

    Ramona

    @Will: another commenter here posted a link to a Wikipedia entry on Bhagat Thind Singh which in part answers our question about pre 1965 immigration from India.

    Good to know that you were pondering my question rather than misunderstanding it.

    The phrase “persecution kick” strikes me as horrible

  331. 331.

    Ramona

    @Kent: my internet is cutting in and out and I lost what I had added to my rhetorical question and felt too dispirited to retype.

    I occasionally respond to what I perceive as leading rhetorical questions with a leading rhetorical question.

    What had gotten lost before was: reading further in Will’s post after I first impulsively responded I found out about the family trauma that explains his in-laws feelings concerning Muslims. I then raced to edit my post to remove the part I felt was insensitive to Will but you responded to exactly that. I am only now learning that one should explain one’s edits but I neglected to do so and I apologize.

    My immediate reason for saying that an Indian’s anti-Muslim feeling is bigotry is the current political context in India where the BJP is stoking violence towards Muslims. Furthermore, it struck me as odd that since 14% of India is Muslim, that the (first I’ve heard) BMW rule should be attributed to ALL Indians.

    Now that you explicitly posit the question, I am tempted to say that any in-group restricting marriage to that in-group does so out of a sense of bigotry. I understand that you are making the point that adherents to a religion have an interest in preserving the religion by restricting marriage only to other adherents of the religion. But, the thought occurs to me that with something like the definition of a religious faith which adherents hold to be beyond rational examination or doubt, then, at least, many of the sects of the Abrahamic faiths look down upon those of other faiths. That seems to me like bigotry.

    I am not Hindu but as I understand it, traditional Hinduism (as opposed to the ahistorical version presented by the BJP) is more a philosophy of life rather than a religion as understood by most people who are only familiar with the Abrahamic faiths.

    Bigotry does not necessarily restrict its targets to immutable characteristics or am I wrong about that?

  332. 332.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ramona: There is, I would suggest, a difference between a preference for something and bigotry against something.

  333. 333.

    bluefoot

    @AM in NC: ​
      I find this tends to be true in first generation Asian Americans, but 2nd generation know the real score – it’s “meritocracy” only for white people. White people are okay with a small number of Asian Americans making it to the big leagues so they can pat themselves on the back for their inclusiveness, but otherwise we are just another minority impeding white supremacy.

  334. 334.

    Ramona

    @Brachiator: Thank-you, good stuff!

    A touch ironic discussing Indians emigrating to the Americas given that the Old World became aware of the existence of the New World because Columbus thought he’d found a shorter sea route to India.

  335. 335.

    geg6

    @Martin:

    I agree about AP courses.  Also dual enrollment.  They are a much better investment in time and money than the SAT or ACT.

  336. 336.

    Kent

    @Ramona: My point is that not all bias is based on bigotry.  Which is usually defined as a UNREASONABLE bias against another group.

    For example, I’m not single, but if I were I would be not particularly interested in dating rabid MAGA Trumpers and would probably screen my online dating accordingly.  Is that a reasonable bias or unreasonable bias?

    Or if I was Amish, Muslim, Catholic or Baptist is it reasonable to restrict my dating pool to people within my own faith if faith is important to me?  Is that a reasonable bias or unreasonable?

    I’m not sure if it is really any different if we are talking about parents.

  337. 337.

    Will

    @Soprano2: You nailed the thinking of some of them. Some of it is bigotry that I alluded to before, but for a good number of those that aren’t bigots but are cheering this ruling think exactly as you said. They are so confident in the test scores, GPAs, and extracurriculars they think they will come out ahead of even whites in this system. While I’m fine with the bigots eventually making their way to Republican party, it’s the ones where they think this will all come down to test scores and that they will beat everyone, black, white, whatever. These folks aren’t bigots and we need to keep them in the party. That’s why I am arguing for better communication than just saying if you were for this ruling you are racist.

    Edit: I’ve got the biggest thumbs I really shouldn’t type on a phone.

  339. 339.

    Another Scott

    Dated one hour ago (a 30s clip):

    Today, I want to offer some guidance to our nation’s colleges as they review their admissions systems after today’s Supreme Court decision:

    They should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America. pic.twitter.com/zrsCl8s1Jd

    — President Biden (@POTUS) June 29, 2023

    Good idea, among many.

    It’s important that the RWNJs on the SCOTUS not have the last word on education policy.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  340. 340.

    Ramona

    @Will: I feel bad for what your wife experienced.

    I am glad you apologized to Alison.

    I hope your injuries heal soon.

  343. 343.

    Betty Cracker

    @Tony Jay:

    I was referring to the Left of the Dem Party itself, who as far as I can see have been brought into the loop and listened to and who have responded by being reliable votes when needed, cheerleaders when required and honest holdouts when possible. That’s how you keep a Big Tent party together and the Biden Era has been a great example of how that works in practice.

    You get US politics better than millions of its direct participants do.

    @Will: I understand that on a molecular level. People can and do say shitty things to me, and I let it pass. I’m far less tolerant about slights to my spouse. Also, I think it’s classy to own your part in the downward spiral of the conversation.

    FWIW, I think I get what you were trying to say in this thread, though — constructive criticism alert! — you could have communicated it more clearly. Look at what’s happened in Florida, which is where I live, with some groups of brown people voting for white fascists at higher rates than white people do. I don’t know the answer but it’s an important question. I suspect, as Tom said at #95, it’s a wicked communication problem. 

  344. 344.

    Ramona

    @Kent: Thank-you for putting into words my vague sense that of course my revulsion of MAGATs is not bigotry because it is reasonable.

     

    @Kent: I definitely see your point and I am of somewhat similar mind with you concerning a parent’s preference that their adult child marry somebody of the same faith. That is, this is a preference rather than bigotry.

    Three things though:

    1. Once you posed the question and I started to ponder it, I began to see that my parents’ preference that I marry a Goan Catholic, let alone somebody not Indian, was somewhat a function of bigotry against outgroups. So, I suppose it depends.

    2. If you could understand Hindi and hear the things rightwing Indian politicians and their followers are saying on TV about “the fun they’ll have playing with the Muslims”, you may understand my judging as bigoted those people who claim they have a rule prohibiting all members of their family from marrying anybody who is Black, Muslim or White. Does that rule hold for Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsees, Catholics, Protestants and Jews (yes, there are Indian Jews and Protestants)? If so, where does that fit into the acronym BMW?

    3. If it is a preference, then it would be simply stated as a preference rather than encapsulated in what I am sure they think is a clever acronym BMW.

  346. 346.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Ramona: Oh you are most welcome. I went to a Catholic school in Mumbai and lived in an area where there were many Goans. Its been years since I have heard Goan Konkani. Goa is one of my favorite places on earth.

    Nice to make your acquaintance!

  347. 347.

    Will

    @schrodingers_cat: Don Bosco’s? I knew a couple of colleagues who went there or Sacred Heart in Navi. Friends with someone that went to I think St Mary’s. Went to a wedding in an old catholic cathedral in Goa that is older than the USA… was amazing except for it being over 110 degrees and we were wearing western wedding outfits.

  348. 348.

    Ramona

    @schrodingers_cat: My pleasure! I enjoy your artwork! I too grew up in Bombay. My Konkani has never been very good. I have spent all of one week in Goa. My father worked in Saudi and his family had settled in Karachi before partitition so my brother and I were Pakistani nationals living with our maternal grandmother so that we could go to school. We started school in Bombay the year of the war over Bangladesh. We were not allowed to travel outside the city because we were considered at ages 7 and 6 enemy nationals.

  349. 349.

    NaijaGal

    @Argiope: ​
     

    Wish I’d seen this earlier. You can use healthcare outcomes by zipcode, since you are a health-education focused institution presumably dedicated to improving healthcare outcomes across the US.

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