Just Enough Rope To Hang Them

The most important lawsuit in the country right now has nothing to do with Horseface Stormy; it's the one exposing Harvard's secrets for choosing its next freshman class. Brought forward on the behalf of Asian-American students by a white activist-attorney, it's exposed some odd media biases. Turns out that racial discrimination is good, even necessary, for society --- if it's discrimination against students with Chinese ancestry. And those Chinese-American kids are really better off taking their perfect high school records and top-rank entrance-exam scores to community colleges, anyway. Who would have thought?

It's also been insinuated that the attorney behind the lawsuit, Edward Blum, is a racist scumbag who hates black people and who is using Asians as a patsy for his own anti-black feelings. All of that's just a smokescreen. This lawsuit, the practices it exposes, and the entire affirmative-action movement in higher education, has very little to do with people of color, except as window dressing. Instead, it's Goodwhite vs. Badwhite, and the stakes for the future are higher than you could possibly imagine.

The easiest way to understand it is this: You can read Harvard's statistics, and if you're willing to do some math you can figure out that "White" students account for about forty-seven percent of admissions. That doesn't seem too far out of line. (The media is reporting forty-seven percent as "fifty-ish", for what it's worth.)

Except. One-third of Harvard students are "legacies", and those legacies are almost all white. Subtract the legacies, and you're looking at a freshman class that is just fourteen percent non-legacy white. We will call that "NPW" for "non-privileged white". Last year, about 54% of high school graduates in the country were NPW, compared to about 14% who were black.

In other words, while total white admission rates to Harvard are only slightly racist, by about fifteen percent, the admission rate of Goodwhites (Harvard legacy students) is stratospheric while the admission rate of Badwhites (from non-Harvard families) is right up there with the survival rate of Me163 "Komet" pilots in 1945. The game is rigged against the majority of non-privileged white students, and horribly so. Why?

The easy answer is that Harvard wants to balance its social credit books without affecting its legacy-admissions systems. While there's certainly plenty of truth to that, the real answer, and one that applies in many places besides this particular school, is less pleasant: our #Blessed one-percenters are intent on pulling up the rope ladder after them. Having made it to the top by displacing the people who were there before them, they're not interested in offering the same chance to others. They fully understand that racial quotas tend to reduce both the statistical achievement of an inbound class and reduce the graduation rate. That's not a bug --- it's a feature. Sure, Bill Gates did okay after he dropped out of school, but on the average, having a kid drop of out Harvard, or excluding him in the first place, virtually ensures that you, or your child, won't have to face him on equal terms in the workplace.

It becomes nothing more than a numbers game. The fewer Ivy League graduates there are, the better the prospects are for the current elite, so the one-percenters support policies that reduce the number of graduates. (This, incidentally, is also why the bar exam in many states keeps getting tougher.) Now here's where we get to the next level. The same goal can be accomplished by diverting people into useless majors (philosophy, gender studies, the majority of "interdisciplinary" topics, all the race-related stuff) because the degrees do not lead to financial success. A Harvard where thirty percent of the class majors in basket-weaving is just as useful to the current elite as a Harvard where thirty percent of the class gives up and goes home. The net result is the same: lower threat levels for the #Blessed and their progeny.

"Wait a minute, you Nazi-ish Nazi," I can hear you screaming. "Affirmative action doesn't put lower-quality students into schools --- it levels the opportunities for equally-talented students of all races who might not have benefited from privilege in their high school years." Well, you are invited to read this Brookings study for some depressing truths, and here are the worst ones:

The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750 (on the math SAT), compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. . Racial gaps in college enrollment have actually been closing in recent years. In fact, the college enrollment gap by income is now significantly larger than by race. The challenge now is about college graduation rates (where race gaps have not closed) as much as college enrollment. . When such large gaps have opened up by the end of the high school years, equalizing outcomes at the college level will be an almost impossible task. Interventions at the end of the K-12 years, or in the early stages of college, can often be too little, too late.

In other words, people with poor SAT scores go on to do poorly in college, regardless of race, because it's too late to "correct" the theoretically deadly effects of racism/privilege/whatever by then. From the perspective of the elite, this, too, is a feature and not a bug. By engaging in affirmative action at the college level, when it's effectively too late, American universities guarantee that today's graduating classes are less likely to threaten their predecessors.

But wait, there's more. It's possible to protect the one-percent kids even more --- by applying the same kinds of requirements to major employers, particularly in the finance sector. There's always going to be room for Muffy Finkelstein at Goldman Sachs, but what about Cole MacDonald from West Virginia, the first person in his family to graduate from Wharton, or John Wu, the supremely accomplished second-generation Chinese-American from California? Better to shuffle those off in favor of a diversity hire. You don't want Muffy having to compete with Cole on the trading floor. She'll have more chances against someone whose SAT score was a full standard deviation below hers, or someone whose degree in Gender Studies ensured that he or she never learned any kind of rigorous critical or logical thinking.

The same process is happening everywhere you look --- in honors societies, in professional associations, in many sports. Once the scales fall from your eyes, it's easy to see people pulling the ladder up behind them everywhere you go. The fundamental tactics are always the same:

* reduce the merit required of incoming students/employees/pilots/bankers/whatever; * ensure that non-privileged-white and Asian kids are disproportionately weeded out; * ensure a clean path for legacy admissions or hiring.

Almost everybody loses. Badwhites and Asians are penalized for their achievement. Affirmative-action candidates are set up to fail --- and even if they succeed, there is a stigma attached to that success that harms their lifetime career prospects. Only the legacies succeed. Worst of all, they get to add insult to injury by virtue-signaling about their devotion to progressive admissions and employment policies that directly benefit them.

It will bite them in the end, of course. The higher they set the bar for Asian and Badwhite students, the sharper those kids will be when they get to the trading floor or the cockpit or the hospital rotation. The Goodwhites are simply putting their enemies through The Dosadi Experiment. If you've read the book, you know what happens to the "one percenters" at the end. If not, well... It ain't pretty. The elite think they are pulling up the rope behind them --- but they're leaving just enough for our children to hang them with.