Search Results for: discrimination

How did Harvard manage to keep both its federal money and its race discrimination policies?

by philg

Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan (the 13th poorest state).

My question for today is how did Harvard keep the river of taxpayer cash going for so long given its explicit race discrimination polices, most famously in admissions and hiring, but also in selling theater tickets. From a 2021 post:

We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.

Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.

Maybe a privately-financed and privately-run theater could refuse to sell tickets to those with the wrong skin color (though it would seem to be contrary to the Maskachusetts state law), but how can a federally-funded enterprise do it?

Here’s Harvard, the operator of a one-race-only theater, claiming the moral high ground as a recipient of federal dollars:

There have been plenty of racists in the history of the United States, but right now I can’t think of any recent racists held up as morally superior to the average person, business, or institution.

Related:

  • Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which Harvard was found to be violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment requiring equal protection (but the Feds said “Hey, let’s just keep sending them money because they surely wouldn’t violate the Constitution ever again”?)

Advocate of gender discrimination loses gender discrimination lawsuit

by philg

“Robert De Niro: Hillary Clinton Should Be the Next President” (Daily Beast 2016):

“I think that she’s paid her dues. There are going to be no surprises, and she has earned the right to be president and the head of the country at this point. It’s that simple. And she’s a woman, which is very important because her take on things may be what we need right now.”

I.e., hiring for the President of the U.S. job should be done based on gender.

“Robert De Niro’s Company Is Found Liable for Gender Discrimination” (New York Times, November 9, 2023):

A federal jury in Manhattan on Thursday found Robert De Niro’s company liable for gender discrimination against a former employee who claimed that the actor assigned her “stereotypically female” job responsibilities such as washing his sheets and attending to his home even as she climbed the ranks of his company, awarding her $1.3 million in damages.

In more than six hours of sometimes colorful and explosive testimony, Mr. De Niro fiercely denied any wrongdoing and dismissed Ms. Robinson’s claims as “nonsense,” though he acknowledged that he could have called Ms. Robinson a “bitch” and a “brat” when she was his employee. He also addressed Ms. Robinson’s claim that Mr. De Niro asked her to scratch his back on occasion, saying that it may have happened one or twice, but that there was never any “disrespect” or “lewdness” attached to it.

Lawyers for Mr. De Niro, 80, portrayed Ms. Robinson, 41, as someone who exploited the trust and generosity of her boss, who had already given her significant perks and gifts — including a Rolex watch and part of a vacation in Hawaii — while also agreeing to pay her a salary of $300,000 per year in 2019, far more than other Canal office workers were paid. They argued that even though she received title changes, per her own request, her job responsibilities remained that of a personal assistant throughout her 11-year employment, and they repeatedly underscored the fact that she had not made any formal complaint over gender discrimination until she had been accused of financial improprieties.

Related:

  • “Years after presidency, Donald Trump is still living rent-free in Robert De Niro’s head” (Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2023): The actor has welcomed his seventh child, which he mentioned in passing earlier this year. The mother is his girlfriend Tiffany Chen, whom he credited with doing the “heavy lifting” with the newborn — De Niro may be an octogenarian, but she is a martial arts instructor. He told the Guardian: “[S]he does the work. And we have help.” … He’s also a grandpa several times over.

Will NASA need to choose a new crew for Artemis in light of the recent Supreme Court decision banning race discrimination?

by philg

We were just at the Kennedy Space Center and learned that discrimination by race and gender ID is something to be proud of. NASA crows that the Artemis crew has been selected to include a person who identifies as a “woman” and another person who identifies as “of color”. From the project web site:

A different branch of government, however, has recently ruled that universities that get government funding shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate by race (see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard). I’m wondering if NASA will now have to redo the hiring for the Artemis mission in a race- and, perhaps, gender-ID-neutral manner.

Here are some photos from the visit, which coincided with a SpaceX launch of the Europeans’ Euclid telescope…

Banners everywhere celebrated “40 years of women in space,” just in time for the term “women” to have become undefined:

Celebrating specific gender/race groups can be continued at home after a visit to the gift shop:

(An immigrant friend pointed out to his kids that “the real hidden figures were 1600 Nazi scientists”)

If Harvard can’t discriminate by race in admissions, how is NASA able to discriminate by race in selecting astronauts?

Related:

Discrimination against Asians not working as well as hoped

by philg

Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! (official U.S. government web site on the subject) This is when non-Asian American say-gooders get to lump together nearly 5 billion disparate people under the all-look-same doctrine. Folks who grew up next door to Idi Amin in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia can celebrate their kinship with folks who grew up on Mangareva.

Let’s look at a story from last month… “Only 8 Black Students Are Admitted to Stuyvesant High School” (NYT):

Once again, tiny numbers of Black and Latino students received offers to attend New York City’s elite public high schools.

Only 9 percent of offers made by elite schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science went to Black and Latino students this year, down from 11 percent last year. Only eight Black students received offers to Stuyvesant out of 749 spots, and only one Black student was accepted into Staten Island Technical High School, out of 281 freshman seats.

Over half of the 4,262 offers this year went to Asian students. … The percentage of Black and Latino enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical High School has hit its lowest point in the city’s recorded history in the last 10 years, a trend that has accelerated during the last several years in particular.

The city’s new chancellor, Meisha Porter, called on the state to eliminate the exam in a statement Thursday. “I know from my 21 years as an educator that far more students could thrive in our specialized high schools, if only given the chance,” she said. “Instead, the continued use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test will produce the same unacceptable results over and over again.”

[Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir] and his partner in the initiative, former Citigroup chairman Richard D. Parsons, promised to shower test preparation companies with money to better prepare Black and Latino students for the exam.

Despite over $750,000 spent on test prep over the last two years, most of which was funneled to existing nonprofit programs across the city, their plan has not made a dent in the numbers.

Discrimination against Asians is legal (see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) and Asian success is, as the top NYC school bureaucrat says, “unacceptable” to non-Asians, yet the comparatively unintelligent non-Asians can’t seem to get their discrimination dials set correctly.

Given that attending college doesn’t help the average person learn (see my review of Academically Adrift), I wonder if discrimination against Asians will drive them to learn so much prior to age 18 that employers will hire them straight from high school. Isn’t that how professional sports sometimes work? The best players are hired before college graduation, right?

Related:

Elite coastal Jews advocate discrimination against white and Asian males

by philg

Let’s look again at White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies? Here’s the latest from our Jewish-owned media elite… “Californians, Vote Yes on Prop 16” (New York Times, October 27):

Black and Latino people have been hit hardest by America’s recent one-two punch of public health and economic crises. They’ve been hospitalized for Covid-19 at quadruple the rate of white Americans. Their businesses have struggled to get the support they requested from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program. As of August, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was nearly double that of white Americans.

Amid these widening disparities, California voters are weighing a measure that could be a big help to women, Black and Latino students and business owners. Proposition 16 aims to reverse Proposition 209, a measure that California passed 24 years ago banning consideration of race, gender or ethnicity in public university admissions and public contracting. California was the first state to try to ban affirmative action, and others — including Michigan, Arizona and Washington — later followed suit.

Given that slots at public universities and funding for business owners are fixed and limited quantities, when Women, Blacks, and Latinos (but not the Latinx?) are advanced, necessarily, it is back of the bus for those unwise enough to identify as “white man” or “Asian man.”

Who else loves discrimination against white and Asian males, according to the NYT?

Proposition 16 has its supporters: the governor, Senator Kamala Harris, top public university officials.

So… a Jewish-owned newspaper reaches out from thousands of mile away to advocate for government-organized discrimination against white males and we will simultaneously say that white males who oppose Jewish-Americans are filled with irrational hatred? (We will also declare that white males who vote against the presidency of Kamala Harris are “voting against their own interest”!)

Related:

Why do LGBTQIA+ workers want to be protected from discrimination by law?

by philg

At a dinner party recently, a person who identifies as a “man” and who is married to another person who identifies as a “man”, disclosed his hatred of Donald Trump (not a big risk in Massachusetts!). On the list of the Trumpenfuhrer’s crimes was “I can be fired if I tell my boss that I am gay.” I tried to refrain from pointing out that as an unemployed person in his mid-50s, he probably wouldn’t be hired in the first place simply due to his age (i.e., that he’d have to get hired despite his age before becoming eligible to be fired due to his sexual preference).

This thought made me wonder, actually, why Americans in the LGBTQIA+ community would want a law protecting them from workplace discrimination. The protected classes are people whom employers consider to be inferior workers:

Is there any evidence that employers currently believe that LGBTQIA+ workers are less healthy, less energetic, less intelligent, less motivated, less able, and/or less educated than non-LGBTQIA+ workers? If not, why spread this negative perception by adding LGBTQIA+ identification to the list of people who need the government to force employers to retain them as workers?

Should judges who approve racial discrimination have to explain the system to children?

by philg

“Harvard Admissions Process Does Not Discriminate Against Asian-Americans, Judge Rules” (nytimes) describes how an Obama-appointed judge approved of Harvard’s system of admitting students based on race. (The NYT headline is interesting; it would be more accurate to say that the judge ruled that she didn’t care whether Harvard discriminated against Asians or that the judge ruled that Harvard did discriminate against Asians, but that they did so with her blessing.)

Here’s my comment:

A Whirlpool factory service guy showed up today to fix the refrigerator (failed in early September after three weeks; soonest service appointment was today, Oct 1). He turned out to be an immigrant from South Korea whose job now is cleaning up after all of the appliance failures experienced by American McMansion-dwellers.

I would love to see the judge explain to his children why they will need to work harder and score higher than children of other races in order to get into a college that is at least partially funded with taxes paid by their appliance repairman dad.

Assuming that other factors are equal, the child of an investment banker with the correct skin color will be admitted by Harvard ahead of the Korean-American child of an appliance technician.

Readers: What do you think? Would judges be less likely to approve of racial discrimination if they had to explain to the young targets of the discrimination how it was going to work?

[Separately, why is it okay for the judge to imply that a group of Asians is lacking in diversity? “In her decision, Judge Burroughs defended the benefits of diversity … ‘The rich diversity at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the benefits that flow from that diversity,’ she added, ‘will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race conscious admissions obsolete.'” Isn’t the implication that if we assemble white and black Americans we have “rich diversity,” but if we assemble a group of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, and Indian students we have a boring monoculture?]

Related:

  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/09/18/why-is-it-difficult-to-make-a-reliable-refrigerator/ (background on the refrigerator saga; the $2,600 Kitchenaid failed after three weeks; the tech today said that it was an example of “Monday morning or Friday afternoon assembly,” with a thermometer that is supposed to control the coil defrost cycle in the wrong place and some blue tape left improperly in the fridge evaporator section. He thought that it would have been easy to see at the factory that the unit had been assembled improperly, so there was at least a deficiency in inspection)
  • “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard,” a paper by economists at Duke, University of Georgia, and University of Oklahoma; Harvard is not seeking out “students of color” because they grew up poor: “disadvantaged African Americans receive virtually no tip for being disadvantaged” (the (Harvard grad) friend who sent me this article concluded “being black confers the same advantage as giving the school over $1 million”)
  • Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court held that University of Michigan could discriminate on the basis of race (against a white woman), but Sandra Day O’Connor wrote “race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time … [the] Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

How is the Harvard admissions race discrimination trial going?

by philg

I was flying all week in the Cirrus SR20 with a European customer of our flight school, so I’m behind on the news. How is the trial in the race discrimination case against Harvard University going? Has anything new been discovered? (That Harvard prefers non-Asian students is not new!)

“Harvard’s gatekeeper reveals SAT cutoff scores based on race” (New York Post):

dean of admissions William Fitzsimmons … said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.

Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.

I find this confusing. Why would Harvard have to send out recruitment letters to Asian men who score 1380? Wouldn’t those guys already know about the existence of Harvard and the possibility of admission? Maybe it makes sense to recruit students with SAT scores of 1100. As this is below the bottom of the range for Michigan State, for example, those students might not realize that they could get into Harvard.

Related:

  • “Official MIT opinion on Korean-Americans” (from 2007): The MIT Dean of Admissions, Marilee Jones, said, never having met the guy, “It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Koreans kids… yet another textureless math grind.” (higher-ups in the MIT Administration were okay with this, apparently, though Jones did run into some difficulty due to issues with her resume (Wikipedia))
  • “Former Dean Resurfaces, Leaving Scandal Behind” (nytimes, 2009): “After a move to New York, and a divorce from Steven R. Bussolari, of M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory, she has re-emerged with a new consulting business, offering her services both to admissions offices and to parents.” (the Massachusetts family law system at the time provided for the potential of lifetime alimony regardless of the length of the marriage, so Jones might not have ever needed to work again)

Discrimination against Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions

by philg

“Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans” (nytimes) is kind of interesting.

The young student, Austin Jia, who was rejected from Harvard is anti-Affirmative Action.  The young student, Emily Choi, who was accepted to Harvard says “I firmly believe in affirmative action.

Here’s an interesting turn of phrase:

A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges

More proof that Rachel Dolezal will be remembered as the most important American of the 21st century.

The same paper carries “Racial Justice Demands Affirmative Action”, from an executive at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Here the Asians who are suing Harvard to end Affirmative Action are characterized as unable to compete with their white overlords:

countless African-American, Native American, Asian and Latino students are still excluded from quality education at all levels. Undoing affirmative action now would reverse the gains we have made and dim the prospects for greater progress.

A commenting schoolteacher disagrees:

The author’s inclusion of Asian students in affirmative action is misplaced here and diminishes her overall thesis. After many years in public education at a diverse, elite public high school, I saw firsthand the struggle of (often economically disadvantaged) Asian students who faced longer odds for admission than their Latino and African American peers. Their SAT scores and GPAs needed to be significantly higher than students of color in order to have a chance at getting into elite schools. How can we claim the arc is moving toward racial justice when one group is treated so differently under admission policies?

Related:

  • my review of Academically Adrift, which gives data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment test indicating that Americans in a whole host of majors learn almost nothing during four years in college

Trump’s election and gender discrimination in the workplace

by philg

I was driving Domestic Senior Management’s car to the instant oil-change place yesterday. We are having our first cold snap in Boston this year, with highs below freezing and lows down to about 13F. On the way I passed the Quick and Clean car wash and decided the vehicle needed an interior vacuum and window cleaning. No doubt emboldened by Trump, the car wash owners had applied a glass ceiling to the floor. Based on wardrobe and hairstyle, there were exactly zero employees identifying as women working on the detail crew, which conducts its work entirely outdoors from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

[Note that this gender-based discrimination should not be confused with the pre-Trump Sex discrimination at the car wash that I observed back in August, before the entire world changed.]