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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This feels like more of a dumb question but why did we have any significant amount of affirmative action for Hispanics in the US?

Thought about it on this tweet on DEI at a UC med school

There are a lot of white hispanics. I would have assumed they could have just picked off to fill their classes with University of Michigan quality white hispanics. Basically Rubio, Cruz, Fernando Mendoza types. And they all for demographic purposes qualify as Hispanic. And you could find a bunch of German Brazilians or Mexican Jews if you needed to. Is the needing to take students that will show a legitimate achievement gap primarily cultural?

The article says the school was 4.6 times more likely to admit a Hispanic student than a white student. I would have assumed that ratio would have been a lot smaller. Is the American hispanic population just a lot browner?

Because Hispanics vote for the party that wants it. It's a combination of political patronage and anti-white ideology from liberals. To their credit, Hispanic voters sometimes vote against it when given the chance.

I don't know about a "significant" amount but I definitely benefited as a very mixed Latino by getting a full ride to my state college a decade ago. I would have gotten most of it paid for by scholarships anyway given I auto-qualified for scholarships based on GPA, residency, and high ACT/SAT score, but my race was worth something like $5-10k in the end. Probably the biggest effect was that the full ride convinced me to spend 4 years in college instead of 3-- I had an insane amount of AP/college credits going in so it would have been easy to drop a year, especially if I decided to single-major instead of double-major. But I figured since I had a full ride anyway I might as well make use of it.

This scholarship was a little funny though because it was for specifically mixed-race students, and that was defined broadly enough to where one of my best friends in college ended up being a white/ 1/32nd native american dude with the same scholarship. The DEI seminar we all had to take had like one lightskin black kid and a lot of white-passing kids.

Overall I think it was pretty stupid since none of us were the kind of underprivileged youth that needed a scholarship, but obviously I wasn't going to turn it down. Cash money baybay!

(I do need to specify that I'm Latino, NOT hispanic.)

Interesting. I don’t think most here differentiate between Latino and Hispanic and I would think for US census bureau purposes they are the same.

I groked it and the main difference seems to be Brazil who usually are Latin but not Hispanic. But the terms are usually interchangeable.

And then Grok lists Italians/Portugal as usually no for Latinos.

Grok also said Italians/Portugal Europeans are usually No for Latino. So in pure Elizabeth Warren identification since I have an Italian surname usually no means sometimes yes. So I am Latino. And since Latino and Hispanic are usually interchangeable I should generally check yes to Hispanic for anything work or educationally related.

But my broader point is for the rightish tail of school entrance that a 4.6 multiple was what was needed to get right amount of Hispanics in?

This feels like more of a dumb question but why did we have any significant amount of affirmative action for Hispanics in the US?

Because Affirmative Action is about satisfying a perceived aesthetic. Colleges thought diversity in line with population percentages was aesthetically a good, so they pursued it, and really didn't care if anyone was "cheating" or they weren't actually achieving their perfect brochures IRL on campus. They wanted the stats to look like their perception.

I don't think there really is much more to it. If there was we would have seen much more sophisticated systems compared to just giving free points (which were explicit in the UMichigan case in the early 2000s, and only since have become hidden, but with the same results). Its not like ADOS were getting lots of points while Nigerian sons of oligarchs were not, or Mexican daughters of construction workers were getting more points that the grandson of Peronist leadership. Its just all paper aesthetics, with a bit of an extra f-you thrown in for white rural and urban males.

That’s sort of my point. There are lots of ways to boost Hispanic and just take in white guys. Why is the Hispanic bump 4.6. Just feels high to me.

Its a supply demand things currently. The demand is high because they see the large Hispanic % on the census. But most of those are pretty crappy. So they give big bonuses

I’ve seen a lot of white hispanics take advantage of affirmative action programs. They were all legitimately smart. IME Hispanics love community college programs to become, like, phlebotomists and technicians of some description who earn the same amount as the college graduates who shouldn’t have gone anyways(with shorter training and less prestige, of course), and that eats a lot of the crowd that would normally be demanding affirmative action.

There’s a separate ‘national Hispanic merit scholar’ thing, that’s like a 1450 SAT instead of 1500. That sort of thing is pretty common for Hispanics who are, shall we say, college material.

I would have assumed they could have just picked off to fill their classes with University of Michigan quality white hispanics.

You put racists in charge of implementing a racist policy, and are somehow expecting the race they hate to not be underrepresented?

Harvard is famous for not admitting many ADOS and filling their class with foreign Africans. They probably do the same with Hispanics and fill their class with a bunch of rich white guys from S America.

I am mostly interested in the right-tail of our education system. And a 4.6 factor of more likely to be accepted feels high to me. Med schools are fairly right tail. Maybe not fully top 1% but up there.

Jews count as white and represent historically something like 40% of Nobels despite a small population. So that boost the listed white population but not to justify a 4.6 number. The other thing I come up with is most white hispanics are from Spain which is outside of what’s considered the highest quality hbd but not all. To lower the number though Europeans largely do not go to American schools but Latin America many do. So there is a large population to choose from of foreigners that count as Hispanic.

When we were doing the thing where a good school had to have identical percentages of American demographics a 4.6 benefit for Hispanics just feels high to me for right tail IQ education.

This should just be the natural impact of Affirmative Action, though? Cementing the most functional people in the desired boosted population, even if most of the time it's going to be some combination of the absolute aristocracy of that population and 'people who don't really share the disadvantages but technically count'. Tons of jokes in Australia about the output of most 'Aboriginal Programs' being a bunch of blondes with at most 10% Indigenous blood.

Hell it's even funnier when the shape of the people succeeding in these programs is frequently so similar. Australia's been culture warring about Nyadol Nyuon lately, a woman who has experienced every boost possible due to being an African Woman, is a consistent complainer and her father is apparently a UN-sanctioned Warlord. Somehow Australia found their own Ilhan Omar at home. It seems to be impossible to construct some form of 'advancing historically underprivileged African voices' without somehow ending up with the progeny of slave traders and warlords in the program.

Harvard is famous for not admitting many ADOS and filling their class with foreign Africans. They probably do the same with Hispanics and fill their class with a bunch of rich white guys from S America.

For an example of how stark this is, there was one African-American student who estimated that there were ZERO students at Harvard who had four grandparents who were ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves).

Essentially the entire black population of Harvard is people who didn't qualify academically with the additional twist of the knife that the descendants of African slave dealers are more represented than the descendants of those who were sold.

Selection effects?

Probably, yeah, but good luck getting any data on it.

This is flippant, but over time I've assumed that our racial victim hierarchy has really just degraded into darker > lighter and if there's a gradient, everyone is rounded to the nearest dark skin tone. Basically, "One Drop".

America adopted Hispanic as a racial category. The Indian-Black-White games are very strong in the native cultures. Just like America only counts Indian but they have their internal caste.

Except that Southern Europeans and Jews (usually) count as white no matter how dark they actually are. Middle Eastern Christians also count as white.

You've been beat to it: colorism.

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