Gideon Rachman has an excellent essay on what goes wrong when you start treating people as members of a group, not as individuals:
An interesting example of the kinds of problems that are thrown up by group-based thinking is a current lawsuit brought against Harvard University for alleged discrimination against Asian-Americans. The complainants argue that Asian-Americans have to achieve better test scores, on average, to get into Harvard and are often marked down on vague measures of personality. This, it is argued, allows Harvard to boost student numbers from other more favoured groups, such as African-Americans, Hispanics and the children of Harvard graduates. Harvard contests the charges.
Even if discrimination is proved, it will have stemmed largely from a well-meaning motive — to increase diversity on campus. The trouble is that it seems logically impossible to discriminate in favour of one group without discriminating against another. The controversy is uncomfortably reminiscent of an earlier era, when Harvard deliberately restricted the number of Jews. That is now regarded as a disgraceful episode; but it is hard to see why it is much different from discriminating against Asian-Americans.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Asian bigotry are equally offensive, even if these two cases result from very different impulses. The pre-war anti-semitism reflected the cultural anxieties of America’s dominant WASP ethnic group. It was basically a right wing idea.
Harvard’s current bias against Asian-Americans reflects a left wing ideology. It begins with the awareness that certain ethnic groups have been cruelly discriminated against throughout history. From that correct premise it reaches the incorrect conclusion that modern income inequality must be the product of current discriminatory practices, and that ethnic groups that are doing well are benefiting from some sort of unfair “privilege”. Actually, many of the Asian students who attend Ivy League schools are the children of immigrants with very modest incomes.
It would be nice if the right had switched positions and was now opposed to this sort of identity politics. Unfortunately, they have gone back to the “America First” nationalism of the interwar years:
In a conversation that actually makes Trump sound reasonable, he tells Bannon that he’s concerned about foreign Ivy League students, highly skilled and otherwise capable of working for or starting their own tech companies, graduating and then returning to their home countries. “When someone is going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Stanford, all the greats” and then graduate, “we throw them out of the country, and they can’t get back in,” he said. “We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country.” To which Bannon replied: “Um.” Trump tried to get Bannon to agree with him, but to no avail. Instead, Bannon suggested there were already too many Asian tech C.E.O.s. in Silicon Valley. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, trailing off. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Steve Bannon was later made a key advisor in the Trump administration, despite Trump’s awareness of his anti-Asian bigotry. And Bannon seems to have convinced the President to change his views on the immigration of highly skilled workers (who are mostly Asians.) In addition, the red hot rhetoric surrounding Trump’s trade war with China seems to have inflamed prejudice against Chinese-Americans. (In fairness, Trump’s attacks are not directed against Chinese-Americans, but the rhetoric certainly has an effect on some of his followers.)
I’ll conclude with a tweet by Jonathan Portes:
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Oct 10 2019 at 5:11pm
It seems tautological that you can’t discriminate in favor of some groups without discriminating against others. Any apparent distinction between the two is purely from how one phrases it. I’m kind of baffled by the judge’s reasoning in rationalizing the decision to uphold Harvard’s policy.
I’m also not sure how restricting the supply of skilled labor fits a populist agenda. Wouldn’t you want to increase skilled labor supply as much as possible to drive up relative demand and wages for less skilled workers? I’m guessing someone will comment that it’s a matter of national security.
Thaomas
Oct 11 2019 at 8:04am
Restricting immigration of high skilled immigrants helps the Trump base exactly the way restricting imports does: not at all.
Mark
Oct 11 2019 at 10:22am
I think the difference in intent is important. I bet most Asians would feel more comfortable with a school that said “we want to give more spots to blacks to increase diversity so they’ll get extra points” versus a school that said “we want to give fewer spots to Asians so they’ll get fewer points.” Even if the result on admissions numbers are the same, the former school has no negative intent towards Asians, and so is probably going to treat them more fairly, at least once they are there.
I agree with you on the economics of skilled immigration, but populist movements are not known for being well-versed in economics, and their grievances are mostly cultural rather than economic. In many Midwestern metros like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, the immigrant population is strongly skewed towards high-skill and there are practically no low-skilled immigrants, yet these places had some of the strongest swings to Trump. https://www.ucsur.pitt.edu/perspectives.php?b=20190314614270
Mark Z
Oct 11 2019 at 1:16pm
I don’t think the difference is very important. “We’re taking from you because we don’t like your group” and “we’re taking from you because we think your group has too much and this other group too little” both bear the same callous indifference to the idea of an individual as something other than merely an instance of one’s race (or whatever other category) that is the core problem imo. I seriously doubt white racists would or should get a better reception if they framed their message more positively (e.g. “we don’t want to hurt anyone, we just want to help out white people, we just feel they’ve earned it…”). I think it’s usually accepted that prejudice without animosity isn’t necessarily any more innocuous.
Phil H
Oct 10 2019 at 7:55pm
The problem with left wing racism is that it looks very much like right wing racism… I think you might be being much too generous to Harvard in this attribution of good motives. If the Harvard discrimination were motivated by a desire to maintain white dominance, what would the outcome be? So far as I can tell, exactly the same: active measures taken to prevent any other ethnic group from becoming a majority of Harvard’s student body.
Harvard, and every other institution in the country, is now formally prevented from excluding any race 100%. But given that constraint, what they’re doing now looks really just the same as what they did in the 19th century.
Mark
Oct 11 2019 at 9:58am
Harvard’s argument for affirmative action, endorsed by the Supreme Court, is that having diversity in terms of critical masses of students from different racial backgrounds, has educational benefits for all students. I think Harvard has taken this argument way too far, but it’s plausible and not based on anti-Asian prejudice. As an analogy, if a school takes some foreign exchange students with a bit lower academic qualifications so that all the other kids can learn about their culture, I wouldn’t see that as anti-American because there’s a legitimate educational motive there.
Scott Sumner
Oct 11 2019 at 11:28am
I certainly don’t think it’s motivated by hatred of Asians, but I believe there is some prejudice here. Harvard rates Asian applicants as having less leadership potential. But that’s only if the Harvard official did not meet them in person.
Richard A.
Oct 10 2019 at 10:50pm
H-1b, which is no more an immigration visa than a tourist visa, has been under a quota of 85,000 for about a decade and a half. The MSM has been playing games with statistics to mislead the public that the Trump administration has cut back on those numbers.
Scott Sumner
Oct 11 2019 at 11:29am
That’s true, but the Trump administration is making it harder to immigrate here by dramatically slowing the paperwork on applications.
Thaomas
Oct 11 2019 at 8:00am
“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man,” but I rather doubt that discrimination against Asian Americans stems from viewing them as “privileged.” More likely its the result of them being the ones squeezed out by faculty, legacy and athletic admissions.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 11 2019 at 9:48am
It is especially true about athletic admissions. If you are good ice hockey player and have decent grades and test scores you have a leg up at almost all the Ivies who field teams. Lacrosse is another sport that is favored by some of the schools (Cornell and Princeton most notably). Cornell also has another built in advantage with the hotel, industrial & labor relations, and agriculture departments that are all separate from the arts & science college.
Mark
Oct 11 2019 at 9:51am
Good points. On the Harvard issue, I would add that the court found that a big part of the reason for lower personality scores for Asians was that Asians got worse recommendations from their high school teachers. So while there is probably bias, some, perhaps even most, of the bias is built into the inputs and not the fault of Harvard.
I would also draw a distinction between Harvard and Bannon on the basis of intent. While both policies are bad, Harvard has no intent to exclude Asians, but this is just an inevitable side-effect of affirmative action for other groups. Bannon’s comments on the other had show a hostile intent towards Asians, especially the clear exaggeration of Asian numbers in Silicon Valley that is reminiscent of arguments about how Jews control all the world’s industries.
And I agree that the trade war is likely to inflame prejudice against Chinese-Americans (or really all Asian-Americans as most people can’t tell different types of Asians apart). It’s hard to think of a time in US history when significant international tension didn’t result in prejudice towards Americans of the other country’s ethnicity. This shows that international peace is important for domestic peace too.
Scott Sumner
Oct 11 2019 at 11:31am
I think you are wrong about Harvard. The Ivy League schools seem to have an informal quota on Asian students. They favor whites over Asians.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 12 2019 at 8:20pm
A judge rules in favour of an elite institution which produces folk like the judge (wonder how many of her network came from Harvard?) in a judgement that keeps the affirmative action system from collapsing under its own absurdities.
Colour me surprised. So to speak.
Harvard has managed to achieve a completely stable “racial” balance for years. Compare Harvard’s intake with, say, Caltech’s. The difference is instructive.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 12 2019 at 8:12pm
That tweet from Jonathan Portes is both stupid and unfair. One can think that what passes for a “migration policy” in much of Europe is disastrously misguided (I certainly do, not least because it is mostly in direct defiance of the preferences of most voters) and still think that identity politics is vicious and misguided.
Particularly as identity politics is a big factor in why Europe mostly cannot have an intelligent discussion about migration.
Thinking that culture matters is also not identity politics.
As for identity politics spreading, well that was predictable. And, indeed, predicted. One of Douglas Murray’s critiques of identity politics is precisely that left wing identity politics encourages right wing identity politics. If folk are going to engage in such creepy activity as “whiteness studies” and explain how being “white” is an indelible moral stain, well of course there is a market for reversing the claims. If we are all just identity groups, as Murray says, why should not people decide to play it so “our” “identity” wins?
There are quite a lot of interviews with Douglas Murray on “The Strange Death of Europe” and “The Madness of Crowds” available via Youtube. They are worth looking up. The books are also well worth reading. “The Strange Death of Europe” has been a Europe-wide best seller for a reason.
As for Muslim migration, Ahmadis, Alevis, Ibadis, Isamilis and similar minority groups are no problem: they and their understanding of Islam has long since adjusted to permanent minority status.
Unfortunately, mainstream Sunni Islam poses very particular problems which get worse as Sunni Islam communities reach various levels of critical mass. There is a reason why Islam spent its first 1000 years or so aggressing against every civilisation it came up against. Islamic aggression against Christendom was much larger (and much more successful) than any counter-attacks the other way (the only successful sustained counter-attack before 1683 being the Reconquista).
This was sustained aggression sanctified by Islam, driven significantly by its polygynous marriage system, fuelled significantly by sexual predation (e.g. the marriages of captured women were automatically annulled: those 72 virgins in heaven are just the after-life peak of sanctified sexual predation) and whose attitudes are still embedded cultural scripts ready to be activated in the right circumstances. As the daily news tell us.
After all, when Osama bin Laden was asked what we had to do to achieve peace he said “first, accept Sharia”. Which is the most imperial legal system ever evolved in human history: it evolved for an empire, has no pre-imperial history and claims to be the rules of the sovereign of the universe that apply to everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs.
In the case of Britain, activating those embedded cultural scripts can be seen the repeated instances of “Asian grooming gangs” which is the dishonest label (as it slanders Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Asian Christians, who have nothing to do with it) for overwhelmingly Muslim rape gangs who sexually predate on underage girls who fail to conform to Muslim norms. This being coordinated sexual predation according to sanctified scrips that anyone who has bothered to research the relevant elements of The Quran, Hadiths and Sharia can identify.
Even those who denounce their activities still have problem being accurate about the gangs. And some of those convicted in said gangs are of European or African background, they are not remotely all Pakistani, but they are overwhelmingly Muslim.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/grooming-gangs-uk-britain-newcastle-serious-case-review-operation-sanctuary-shelter-muslim-asian-a8225106.html
Muslim migrants also overwhelming reject equal (or any) rights for gays. Which is why certain gay intellectuals, such as Bruce Bawer and Douglas Murray, have an extra layer of concern. You do not have to think that identity politics have anything going for it to think that culture matters. We are the cultural species, of course it matters.
Mark Brady
Oct 12 2019 at 11:28pm
How about a classical liberal take on the topic?
The bottom line is that Harvard University is a private institution and should be allowed to choose its students any which way it wants. That said, federal government support for private institutions like Harvard should be axed. And that should include federal government aid to students attending private institutions like Harvard. The implication is that these institutions would have to finance the attendance of their students without recourse to the federal trough.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 13 2019 at 6:22pm
Jonathan Portes’s tweet is both stupid and unfair. But I gather I cannot explain why without being deleted.
I will just say that both “The Strange Death of Europe” and “The Madness of Crowds” by Murray are well worth reading and there are plenty of Youtube clips available where he presents his arguments.
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