I'm surprised they don't get all the admissions data and do some data mining with machine learning to figure out admissions trends. That would be the easiest way to prove whether or not there is any real bias.
To me the most suspicious thing is that the demographics of different races remain just about the same year after year after year. That reeks of manipulation, just like how Madoff's returns were almost always perfectly similar year after year.
Preference for children of donors and legacies are such blatantly racist admission policies, it's shocking that they're even legal. The fact that this lawsuit is targeting affirmative action rather than those policies is incredibly telling.
I don't think income is a protected class, therefore the government shouldn't care and Harvard could pick and choose based on that freely. Also, it's not a 'race' to have money so it's not racist.
Please don't post like this to HN. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
> A new study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies has found that white households in the middle-income quintile own nearly eight times as much wealth as middle-income black earners and ten times as much as middle-income latino earners.
I believe jakelazaroff was objecting to lalos' description that "income [isn't] a protected class, therefore the government shouldn't care and Harvard could pick and choose based on that freely."
Anti-discrimination laws don't depend only on explicit selection of a primary characteristic, but also disallow discrimination based on secondary characteristics which are correlated with the primary ones.
For example, can a company have an anti-beard policy for its employees? The answer is "it depends". There may be legitimate work-related reasons, in which case the company may do so, even if, for example, there is a religious objection from an observant Sikh who lets his hair grow naturally as one of the symbols to profess his faith.
On the other hand, if there isn't a legitimate work-related reason then it might be found discriminatory against race. Quoting the example from https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/race_color.cfm :
> An employment policy or practice that applies to everyone, regardless of race or color, can be illegal if it has a negative impact on the employment of people of a particular race or color and is not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. For example, a "no-beard" employment policy that applies to all workers without regard to race may still be unlawful if it is not job-related and has a negative impact on the employment of African-American men (who have a predisposition to a skin condition that causes severe shaving bumps).
jakelazaroff's observation isn't simply that wealth is correlated with race and therefore any selection which depends on wealth must necessarily be discrimination based on race. Rather, it is an objection to lalos's incorrect characterization of how US civil rights law works.
If someone were to make argument that wealth is correlated with race, and therefore expensive goods are discriminatory, then that may have some merit. However, it does not have legal merit. Companies are allowed to select what goods to offer and the pricing. A store can decide to only offer goods which are primarily used by men, or primarily used by members of a specific religion. Similarly, the law doesn't prevent a store from discrimination based on poverty.
Also, this Harvard case isn't related to consumer products, and different sets of laws apply to student admissions, to employees, and to consumers, so your objection doesn't seem that relevant to this topic.
The example you gave about shaving bumps is a perfect example, because it has nothing to do with race - a no-beard rule that was unrelated to the business would be equally discriminatory against black and latino people who happened to have that condition. In that case the correlation with race is immaterial. Admittedly the courts have probably made a few mistakes in the past when ruling on this issue.
A "perfect example" of what? I can interpret what you wrote as being a perfect counter-example to lalos' description, showing it to be incorrect, or a perfect example of how the law is wrong and mistaken.
The EEOC guidelines are invariably based on case law to highlight examples. The specific court case is Bradley v. Pizzaco of Nebraska, Inc. The Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudofolliculitis_barbae comments that the court "found that Domino's Pizza's no-beard policy created a disparate impact by excluding a quarter of black males from employment but almost no white males."
The court case at https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=154197172700982... says "The record shows PFB almost exclusively affects black males. White males, however, rarely suffer from PFB or other skin disorders that make shaving difficult. Medical witnesses for both sides testified that as many as forty-five percent of black males have PFB." The Wikipedia page further adds "Both occur frequently in black men in the military, where it is so common that services often have widely known protocols for management".
Your comment about "latino people" appears to be an irrelevant hypothetical. It also muddies the waters as it requires pointing out that "race" and "ethnicity" are (quoting the OMB) "social-political constructs . . . and should not be interpreted as being genetic, biological, or anthropological in nature", that "Black or African American" and "White" are treated as a race category, and 'Hispanic or Latino' is an ethnic category, while all three fall under US Civil Rights law. That's a very long way for me to say that there's nothing about being Latino which makes one more more prone to PFB - black Latinos will have an higher incidence rate than white Latinos.
In a very real sense, whatever you answer is irrelevant. Neither EEOC law nor consumer law are the same as the laws regarding enrollment decisions. All I'm trying to show is that lalos' characterization of "protected class" - one which you seem to want to be true - is not a valid interpretation of US case law.
Here is another example from the EEOC, if you don't like the shaving one: "since sickle cell anemia predominantly occurs in African Americans, a policy which excludes individuals with sickle cell anemia must be job related and consistent with business necessity". https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_reports/best_practices.cfm
> Height and Weight: Standards for height and weight sometimes are challenged as having an unlawful adverse impact. For example, a requirement that employees be at least six feet tall might have an adverse impact on Asian Americans due to average height and weight differences, and thus such a requirement would need to be job-related and consistent with business necessity.(152)
> Dress: An employer can impose the same dress code on all workers in similar jobs, regardless of their race or ethnicity, as long as the policy was not adopted for discriminatory reasons and is enforced evenhandedly. However, an employer must treat racial or ethnic attire that complies with the dress code the same as other attire that complies with the dress code.(153) For example, Title VII prohibits employers from banning the wearing of traditional Hawaiian dress that complies with the employe...
Why is it a 'perfect' counter-example against my description if it involves beards and job applications when I was talking about income and applying to universities? Is that perfect? Get me counter-example where at least income was discussed as the discriminatory factor or do you think a lawyer would provide the case you mentioned as precedence on this other case? Be more humble, your example just moves the goalpost to provide a contrarian point of view, its far from perfect.
I specifically said that these cases were not comparable because they are covered by different civil rights laws.
My objection is to your use of "I don't think income is a protected class, therefore the government shouldn't care". "Protected class" has a wider meaning in civil rights law.
I pointed to other cases where seemingly generic prohibitions, which are not themselves protected classes, have a sufficiently high correlation with a prohibited class that the courts have ruled that the generic prohibition (no shaving, height requirement, clothing styles, and more) is a violation of civil rights law.
Some of these are almost certainly portable to enrollment policies. A college which receives federal funding won't be able to use a genetic test to prohibit those carrying the sickle cell anemia mutation, because of its strong correlation with race.
So while I think there are certainly valid objections to jakelazaroff's original statement "Preference for children of donors and legacies are such blatantly racist admission policies", and I agree that income is not and should not be a protected class, and I agree that there can be bona fide business reasons to have a preference for wealthy people, the case law is pretty solid that discrimination on X where X is not a protected class can still result in the government caring.
Certainly you understand that correlation does not imply a cause, and it makes absolutely no sense to make racist accusations just because some people are able to buy their way into being admitted to a school.
This line of argument, based on shoe-horning baseless accusations of racism with no substance whatsoever, onlu contributes to not take race-based accusations seriously, and that's a major problem because there are clear race-based problems in the US.
Whether it's correlation or causation doesn't matter: that question can be rephrased as "is there a difference between de facto and de jure discrimination?" and the answer is no.
"Accusations of racism" slightly mischaracterizes my argument. I'm not accusing any individual of racism, I'm saying that the college admissions system in many ways privileges white applicants.
Affirmative action is often the scapegoat - legacies and donors are often entirely absent in conversations about it. Which honestly doesn't make much sense.
It's likely the combination of the two. If you have an x% quota for URMs, and you have another y% effectively earmarked for legacies, that sets an implicit (100-x-y)% cap for Asian-Americans and low-SES whites.
Also, you have to factor in that legacy admissions are part of the benefit conferred by Harvard and other elite institutions. It transforms Harvard admission from a one-time personal benefit to a durable and heritable asset that can be passed down from generation to generation.
It's a blatantly racist benefit, though. Princeton, for example, accepted its first black students in 1947 [1]; there are likely even students today whose legacy status is a result of their still-living grandparent or great-grandparent taking advantage of this.
The lawsuit is technically not about affirmative action. The part of the suit that involved affirmative action was dismissed. Right now what's only being determined is whether Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in particular.
It is a private organization. Feel free to argue that the policy is flawed or that the government shouldn't route tax dollars to Harvard or discourage people from affiliating themselves with Harvard, but legal constraints on admission would be an overreach that run into 1st Amendment constraints on freedom of association.
Discrimination against protected classes is still prohibited in private organizations.
Even if that weren't the case, though, we should still oppose this lawsuit, which is quite literally an attempt to put legal constraints on admission to Harvard.
Anti-discrimination laws regarding protected classes aren't applicable in general to private organizations.
I believe that they generally are related to employment and public accommodations and to educational institutions that receive public funds. There are probably some other situations also.
So Harvard Book Store can't discriminate based on protected classes (public accommodation) and Harvard can't discriminate when hiring staff (employer) and can't discriminate if they receive public funds.
If Harvard refused public funds then they could set their own standards. This is why I suggested that it would make sense to remove federal funding. For example, here are some schools who have refused federal dollars:
I’m pretty sure if a privately owned bar refused to allow Asian-Americans or any other person based on their appearance in the public would rightly have an issue.
Why should Harvard, or any other organisation play by different rules?
> if a privately owned bar refused to allow (...) based on their appearance
You've described how bars operate on a regular basis. Some establishments even employ staff dedicated to control who gets in based on their appearance.
31 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] threadTo me the most suspicious thing is that the demographics of different races remain just about the same year after year after year. That reeks of manipulation, just like how Madoff's returns were almost always perfectly similar year after year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wealth and race are highly correlated. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/09/14/racial...
> A new study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies has found that white households in the middle-income quintile own nearly eight times as much wealth as middle-income black earners and ten times as much as middle-income latino earners.
Anti-discrimination laws don't depend only on explicit selection of a primary characteristic, but also disallow discrimination based on secondary characteristics which are correlated with the primary ones.
For example, can a company have an anti-beard policy for its employees? The answer is "it depends". There may be legitimate work-related reasons, in which case the company may do so, even if, for example, there is a religious objection from an observant Sikh who lets his hair grow naturally as one of the symbols to profess his faith.
On the other hand, if there isn't a legitimate work-related reason then it might be found discriminatory against race. Quoting the example from https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/race_color.cfm :
> An employment policy or practice that applies to everyone, regardless of race or color, can be illegal if it has a negative impact on the employment of people of a particular race or color and is not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. For example, a "no-beard" employment policy that applies to all workers without regard to race may still be unlawful if it is not job-related and has a negative impact on the employment of African-American men (who have a predisposition to a skin condition that causes severe shaving bumps).
jakelazaroff's observation isn't simply that wealth is correlated with race and therefore any selection which depends on wealth must necessarily be discrimination based on race. Rather, it is an objection to lalos's incorrect characterization of how US civil rights law works.
If someone were to make argument that wealth is correlated with race, and therefore expensive goods are discriminatory, then that may have some merit. However, it does not have legal merit. Companies are allowed to select what goods to offer and the pricing. A store can decide to only offer goods which are primarily used by men, or primarily used by members of a specific religion. Similarly, the law doesn't prevent a store from discrimination based on poverty.
Also, this Harvard case isn't related to consumer products, and different sets of laws apply to student admissions, to employees, and to consumers, so your objection doesn't seem that relevant to this topic.
The EEOC guidelines are invariably based on case law to highlight examples. The specific court case is Bradley v. Pizzaco of Nebraska, Inc. The Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudofolliculitis_barbae comments that the court "found that Domino's Pizza's no-beard policy created a disparate impact by excluding a quarter of black males from employment but almost no white males."
The court case at https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=154197172700982... says "The record shows PFB almost exclusively affects black males. White males, however, rarely suffer from PFB or other skin disorders that make shaving difficult. Medical witnesses for both sides testified that as many as forty-five percent of black males have PFB." The Wikipedia page further adds "Both occur frequently in black men in the military, where it is so common that services often have widely known protocols for management".
Your comment about "latino people" appears to be an irrelevant hypothetical. It also muddies the waters as it requires pointing out that "race" and "ethnicity" are (quoting the OMB) "social-political constructs . . . and should not be interpreted as being genetic, biological, or anthropological in nature", that "Black or African American" and "White" are treated as a race category, and 'Hispanic or Latino' is an ethnic category, while all three fall under US Civil Rights law. That's a very long way for me to say that there's nothing about being Latino which makes one more more prone to PFB - black Latinos will have an higher incidence rate than white Latinos.
In a very real sense, whatever you answer is irrelevant. Neither EEOC law nor consumer law are the same as the laws regarding enrollment decisions. All I'm trying to show is that lalos' characterization of "protected class" - one which you seem to want to be true - is not a valid interpretation of US case law.
Here is another example from the EEOC, if you don't like the shaving one: "since sickle cell anemia predominantly occurs in African Americans, a policy which excludes individuals with sickle cell anemia must be job related and consistent with business necessity". https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_reports/best_practices.cfm
Here are some more, from https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/race-color.html :
> Height and Weight: Standards for height and weight sometimes are challenged as having an unlawful adverse impact. For example, a requirement that employees be at least six feet tall might have an adverse impact on Asian Americans due to average height and weight differences, and thus such a requirement would need to be job-related and consistent with business necessity.(152)
> Dress: An employer can impose the same dress code on all workers in similar jobs, regardless of their race or ethnicity, as long as the policy was not adopted for discriminatory reasons and is enforced evenhandedly. However, an employer must treat racial or ethnic attire that complies with the dress code the same as other attire that complies with the dress code.(153) For example, Title VII prohibits employers from banning the wearing of traditional Hawaiian dress that complies with the employe...
My objection is to your use of "I don't think income is a protected class, therefore the government shouldn't care". "Protected class" has a wider meaning in civil rights law.
I pointed to other cases where seemingly generic prohibitions, which are not themselves protected classes, have a sufficiently high correlation with a prohibited class that the courts have ruled that the generic prohibition (no shaving, height requirement, clothing styles, and more) is a violation of civil rights law.
Some of these are almost certainly portable to enrollment policies. A college which receives federal funding won't be able to use a genetic test to prohibit those carrying the sickle cell anemia mutation, because of its strong correlation with race.
So while I think there are certainly valid objections to jakelazaroff's original statement "Preference for children of donors and legacies are such blatantly racist admission policies", and I agree that income is not and should not be a protected class, and I agree that there can be bona fide business reasons to have a preference for wealthy people, the case law is pretty solid that discrimination on X where X is not a protected class can still result in the government caring.
Certainly you understand that correlation does not imply a cause, and it makes absolutely no sense to make racist accusations just because some people are able to buy their way into being admitted to a school.
This line of argument, based on shoe-horning baseless accusations of racism with no substance whatsoever, onlu contributes to not take race-based accusations seriously, and that's a major problem because there are clear race-based problems in the US.
"Accusations of racism" slightly mischaracterizes my argument. I'm not accusing any individual of racism, I'm saying that the college admissions system in many ways privileges white applicants.
Also, you have to factor in that legacy admissions are part of the benefit conferred by Harvard and other elite institutions. It transforms Harvard admission from a one-time personal benefit to a durable and heritable asset that can be passed down from generation to generation.
[1] https://www.jbhe.com/chronology/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/anti-asian-bia...
Even if that weren't the case, though, we should still oppose this lawsuit, which is quite literally an attempt to put legal constraints on admission to Harvard.
I believe that they generally are related to employment and public accommodations and to educational institutions that receive public funds. There are probably some other situations also.
So Harvard Book Store can't discriminate based on protected classes (public accommodation) and Harvard can't discriminate when hiring staff (employer) and can't discriminate if they receive public funds.
If Harvard refused public funds then they could set their own standards. This is why I suggested that it would make sense to remove federal funding. For example, here are some schools who have refused federal dollars:
https://deanclancy.com/a-list-of-colleges-that-dont-take-fed...
Why should Harvard, or any other organisation play by different rules?
You've described how bars operate on a regular basis. Some establishments even employ staff dedicated to control who gets in based on their appearance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18260972
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224053