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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.

If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.

I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.

Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.

While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.

Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.

All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).

But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?

How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.

If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.

At the M7 business school I attended all the applicants who selected Black as their race were interviewed by a member of the Black Students Association - if you didn’t seem “Black” when interviewed I doubt you would be accepted.

Jesus.

Absolute crazy reading this as a non American. How are people not turning into blithering racists amidst all this?

I might be particularly disagreeable but I would go especially out of my way to make things as bad as I can for blacks if any such thing was done to me.

Students making admissions decisions???? Absolute madness.

Absolute crazy reading this as a non American. How are people not turning into blithering racists amidst all this?

The meme "And then one day for no reason at all..." came into being for a reason, and it wasn't just Forrest Gump fanatics. But most people, even those rejected for their whiteness, accept this sort of thing as their due; the propaganda is just that good.

But most people, even those rejected for their whiteness, accept this sort of thing as their due; the propaganda is just that good.

There's probably a truckload of adaptive self-deception going on here. If you've been screwed over by the dominant ideology, there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from opposing said ideology - all you'll do is dig your hole even deeper. The best way forward is to take the loss and still continue to espouse these dominant beliefs, which helps you gain status among your peer group and in society at large (and the best way to do so is to actually, sincerely believe it regardless of what happened). Indignation is only productive if you can change something or if people are willing to listen to you, and in this case, neither are true.

I genuinely think political dissidents inherently need to be disagreeable in their personality and at least a little bit suicidal. The incentives for compliance are unbelievably strong.

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I mostly agree, but I think I would go even further than you:

Everyone online believes they've uncovered the TRUE glorious secret behind society, but at the same time they disagree fundamentally about what that secret is in ways that are rather obviously self-serving.

It depends what you mean by self-serving. If you mean self-serving as in "adopting this benefits me individually in the context of the larger culture", I could perhaps agree with that. If you mean self-serving in the sense of benefiting their own identity group, I've seen far too many whites and especially men who hold beliefs that actively work to the detriment of their in-group as a whole to believe that people actually consistently act in the interest of their identity group. While I think there's a case to be made that white liberals' out-group biases are a product of specific cultural circumstances, in the case of men I think their out-group biases favouring women might be evolutionarily ingrained and thus intractable.

My problem with the woke has never really been with black people advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of black people, or feminists advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of women, or gay people advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of gay people, or what have you. That seems perfectly predictable, and entirely their right in a democratic society.

While advocacy for one's own identity group is part and parcel of free speech and should not be made illegal or censored, I will not go so far as to say I don't have a problem with this. In a society where people see your words as carrying more weight and more value than others, and where you can override others by invoking the social status of your identity alone, using it to unduly benefit yourself and to promote threat narratives against a target identity group is a flagrant abuse of power. I see it as taking advantage of other people's goodwill, and while it probably shouldn't fall under the ambit of the law I think behaviour like this should be taken care of in the social sphere and shunned appropriately. Unfortunately the fact that the social environment allows that in the first place means that social opprobrium for this behaviour is unlikely. It's the most underhanded form of power-grabbing - it can't be easily regulated and entails minimal risk on one's part, and can result in havoc for others.

To speak frankly, it is because of this ethical code that it massively irks me whenever I see a PoC promoting critical race theorist rhetoric, or a woman promoting feminist beliefs, or LGBT people promoting various critical-theorist talking points that helps them gain social and legal privileges. I fall into some of these groups myself, and adamantly refuse to take advantage of the minority status that these things confer upon me. I expect others also granted "epistemic advantage" to do the same, and if they don't I have no problem labelling their behaviour as being fundamentally objectionable.

We're currently seeing an attempt at an unchecked, shameless power grab, and if that's not going to change, one of the only real ways out of that hegemony which I can think of is to develop strong identity-narratives of one's own and to try to beat them at their own game. This is not to say that this is an ideal outcome, but the combative dynamic is in place and is here to stay (mind, I would prefer if it wasn't). And if I'm right about this, I see absolutely no other viable option but to play that game in order to balance the social scales at least a little bit. There is no scenario I can see where you can contest them by perpetually taking the high road and refusing to engage - you simply can't beat conflict theorists like that.