Top Colleges Discriminating Against Asian Students:Thoughts?

[Starglider]

And processing big data is basically just an application of shared-nothing concurrency.

No it isn't. Firstly not all big data processing is shared-nothing, and secondly the concurrency aspect is just implementation detail, the actual data science part is what logical operations you are applying to the data to render it into something useful (and maybe big O performance concerns but generally not the constant factor).

Yes, MapReduce is an impressive and promising paradigm.

No it isn't. It was in 2000 or so. This is 2015 and even commercial applications (e.g. even back-office stuff at investment banks) are moving on from map reduce to generalised distributed data graph processing (e.g. ditching Hadoop and moving to Spark or maybe Storm). The leading edge of data science research has long since moved on.

And using TCP/IP for all this is actually pretty recent - before they were using Infiniband and other lower-latency protocols for this stuff.

Aargh no stop talking. I am 'they' and we were using TCP/IP from the beginning of commodity cluster computing. Myrinet and later Infiniband were always for the best-funded users who had relatively close-coupled problems. Actually even if you look at TOP500 class clusters, i.e. the richest high-end users, ethernet was by far the most common interconnect from the mid 90s right up to 2010, where Infiniband finally reached parity. Infiniband is in the lead as of 2014 (as a share of TOP500 sites; not compute clusters in general) but that is largely due to delays to commoditastion of 10G switches; adoption of 10G is now exploding and with 40G becoming practical for the core it looks set to effectively obsolete Infiniband. Anyway, latency wouldn't even be relevant if it these were actually shared nothing problems.

Yeah, we've got Haskell with monads, and lots of upcoming languages trying to invent new abstractions for concurrency, but at the end of the day there's very little that's radically different from what we had with Lisp 40 years ago.

I agree that language innovation stalled on some level, because if you look at the 80s predictions for 4th and 5th generation languages (visual programming, logic programming, pervasive formal verification, report generation and natural language programming), they didn't pan out. Much progress has been made and the cutting edge of enterprise search e.g. Watson can now handle nearly-natual-language individual queries, but for various complicated reasons this has not yet impacted the basic process of coding. However virtual machines are vastly more sophisticated (garbage collection and virtualisation are actually practical now for real applications), libraries are vastly more sophisticated, IDEs are vastly more sophisticated, knowledge of the actual hardware is no longer required. If you are talking about the actual experience of coding on a 60s mainframe timeshare terminal (assuming you got lucky and weren't stuck on offline punched cars) with a 2015 computer, it is very very different. Even 80s home computers were very different, most of the things modern programmers take for granted were first prototyped in the 70s, only available in basic form on very expensive workstations in the 80s, and finally made it to mass market in the 90s.

Perhaps qbits will change that

Qbits don't do anything you can't do with conventional bits. Quantum computing is for performance, not some fundamental redefinition of computability. As far as we know, Turing computation is still the most general model (save for some quibbling about halting conditions).

but I'm still bit shifting it old school like they did in the 70s.

So what? Mathematicians are still multiplying the way they did in 50 BC. But multiplication is a much much smaller fraction of maths now and bit twiddling is a much much smaller fraction of skills programmers need to know. In fact in the 70s most programmers had to know how to do bit manipulation, whereas now most programmers don't need to know it (as you will find out if you try interviewing for anything other than C or embedded/driver developers), which is itself an indication of progress.

[Channel72]

No it isn't. It was in 2000 or so. This is 2015 and even commercial applications (e.g. even back-office stuff at investment banks) are moving on from map reduce to generalised distributed data graph processing (e.g. ditching Hadoop and moving to Spark or maybe Storm). The leading edge of data science research has long since moved on.

Ha! Please. Which investment banks? Hedge funds and investment banks are so fucking behind it's not even funny. Most of the top US investment banks are still struggling to like... install Hadoop, let alone do anything like make use of distributed object graphs. I can guarantee that if you talk to anyone who works at like, Goldman Sachs, they won't even know what the fuck Spark is. You have a really rosy view of the actual state of the art here. Even Google still uses MapReduce for like 95% of distributed processing tasks. And Apache Spark is just a layer over things like HDFS and still has very little industry adoption, and the fact that you think it represents some kind of major breakthrough over MapReduce is laughable.

Aargh no stop talking. I am 'they' and we were using TCP/IP from the beginning of commodity cluster computing. Myrinet and later Infiniband were always for the best-funded users who had relatively close-coupled problems. Actually even if you look at TOP500 class clusters, i.e. the richest high-end users, ethernet was by far the most common interconnect from the mid 90s right up to 2010, where Infiniband finally reached parity. Infiniband is in the lead as of 2014 (as a share of TOP500 sites; not compute clusters in general) but that is largely due to delays to commoditastion of 10G switches; adoption of 10G is now exploding and with 40G becoming practical for the core it looks set to effectively obsolete Infiniband. Anyway, latency wouldn't even be relevant if it these were actually shared nothing problems.

Yeah, I am also "they" and earlier distributed computing solutions like Lustre were mostly designed for higher end interconnects and hardware, and didn't have the kind of failover we have now because they didn't expect your shit to break as often. Commodity distributed computing is worthless without robust failover and redundancy, which wasn't even considered by most early distributed file systems, let alone shit like MPI, until fairly recently (like the last 15 years or so.) Please point me to a distributed file system or framework, made before 2000, made for commodity interconnects which has the kind of robust failover you get with HDFS/GFS.

I agree that language innovation stalled on some level, because if you look at the 80s predictions for 4th and 5th generation languages (visual programming, logic programming, pervasive formal verification, report generation and natural language programming), they didn't pan out.

Yeah, to say the last.

Much progress has been made and the cutting edge of enterprise search e.g. Watson can now handle nearly-natual-language individual queries, but for various complicated reasons this has not yet impacted the basic process of coding. However virtual machines are vastly more sophisticated (garbage collection and virtualisation are actually practical now for real applications), libraries are vastly more sophisticated, IDEs are vastly more sophisticated, knowledge of the actual hardware is no longer required. If you are talking about the actual experience of coding on a 60s mainframe timeshare terminal (assuming you got lucky and weren't stuck on offline punched cars) with a 2015 computer, it is very very different. Even 80s home computers were very different, most of the things modern programmers take for granted were first prototyped in the 70s, only available in basic form on very expensive workstations in the 80s, and finally made it to mass market in the 90s.

Fair enough, that's all true. But firstly, my point is that the science and theory behind it all hasn't changed much. It's still basically applying algorithms and data structures and measuring time/space complexity of said algorithms. You might find that too reductionist of a statement, but remember the context which prompted me to say it. I was responding to the old cliche of the out-of-work, obsoleted programmer who can't get a job because he only knows Python 2.x and doesn't know Python 3.x. This cliche is mostly a myth, as the fundamentals of computer science haven't changed much since the 60s. I'm sure you'd at least agree with that sentiment.

Qbits don't do anything you can't do with conventional bits. Quantum computing is for performance, not some fundamental redefinition of computability. As far as we know, Turing computation is still the most general model (save for some quibbling about halting conditions).

I'm not saying otherwise, but qbits have opened fundamentally new approaches to algorithms, some of which have been demonstrably shown to improve the complexity of certain tasks, (i.e. Grover's algorithm, Shor's algorithm, etc.) You just can't do that stuff with a classical computer. So I would consider that a fundamental breakthrough in computer science.

So what? Mathematicians are still multiplying the way they did in 50 BC. But multiplication is a much much smaller fraction of maths now and bit twiddling is a much much smaller fraction of skills programmers need to know. In fact in the 70s most programmers had to know how to do bit manipulation, whereas now most programmers don't need to know it (as you will find out if you try interviewing for anything other than C or embedded/driver developers), which is itself an indication of progress.

Again, I'm not saying computer science is some kind of dead field with no new research. Just that it hasn't fundamentally changed much in the last couple of decades. I was refuting the cliche idea of the obsoleted programmer who can't get a job because he doesn't know the latest/greatest version of C# or whatever.

[Komodo9Joe]

I mean, any visible minority is going to be the target of some discrimination. It's just that currently, Asians experience less discrimination on average than say, blacks, because Asians tend to be successful people and so they're not associated with crime and poverty the way blacks/latinos are.

I fundamentally disagree with your statement that Asians face less discrimination. Aside from that notion being unable to be quantified, if Asians are discriminated against in other forms, it's just as much discrimination as when blacks/latinos are branded as commonly impoverished and/or criminal. And the passage I posted in the OP offers a specific example of discrimination against Asians, regarding the unfair college assessment of Asian applicants in regards to applicants from other ethnic backgrounds.

[Channel72]

I mean, any visible minority is going to be the target of some discrimination. It's just that currently, Asians experience less discrimination on average than say, blacks, because Asians tend to be successful people and so they're not associated with crime and poverty the way blacks/latinos are.

I fundamentally disagree with your statement that Asians face less discrimination. Aside from that notion being unable to be quantified, if Asians are discriminated against in other forms, it's just as much discrimination as when blacks/latinos are branded as commonly impoverished and/or criminal. And the passage I posted in the OP offers a specific example of discrimination against Asians, regarding the unfair college assessment of Asian applicants in regards to applicants from other ethnic backgrounds.

I'm not Asian, so I can't compete with whatever personal experience you might have if you are Asian. But I really... really... really find it hard to believe that Asian Americans, in any conceivable way, have it worse than black/Latino Americans when it comes to discrimination.

A much higher percentage of blacks and Latinos end up incarcerated than whites or Asians. Blacks and Latinos measurably make way less money than whites and Asians. I mean - Jews make even more than Asians (I think on average Jews make more than anyone). Jews are also very loud when it comes to combating discrimination, especially given the fact that the Holocaust is still a living memory for some. Well... I'm Jewish - I don't fucking feel discriminated at all. In fact, being Jewish has only been an advantage, both economically and socially.

But then, I'm not a visible minority and I can't speak for the Asian experience in 21st century America. But other than a couple of Seinfield gags and general racist humor (which applies to every ethnicity), I just don't see Asians facing anywhere near the kind of discrimination that blacks and Latinos do. For a visible minority, Asians seem to have it pretty good, socio-economically speaking. Discrimination against Asians is more like discrimination against Jews - you know, the funny kind of discrimination (A Jew walks into a bar, and then purchases the bar... ha! etc.), not the serious kind of discrimination where you actually fucking get passed over for a job because your last name is Lopez, or worse, profiled and harassed by the police. When is the last time a Wong, Li or Cohen got passed over for a high-paying job, let alone got arrested for being out too late? The fact that Harvard is apparently discriminating against Asians in their selection process is almost like the exception that proves the rule at this point. (Um... are you seriously complaining that the TOP fucking Ivy League school in the world won't let you in, when many blacks/Latinos are lucky if they can afford to go to their local community college in the Bronx ?? )

But again, I'm not Asian. If you are, perhaps you can help dispel my ignorance here and enlighten me in regard to your plight.

[madd0ct0r]

Could the computing science section gets it's own.thread? It's interesting to read but not exactly the topic.


Re American Asian racism: given the American war in Vietnam is also within living memory I wouldn't be surprised if some veterans are still bitter. I've also seen a lot of outright racism about Chinese manufacturing, which may boil over onto Asian Americans?

Plus the whole fetishisation of Japanese school girls, but I doubt that's widespread.

[Simon_Jester]

The making fun of "Made in China" (and before it Taiwan, and before it Japan) is mostly a specific consequence of people trying to blame the perceived shoddiness of their consumer goods on the manufacturer. If the products were made in the USA people would just tell different jokes about them. If the products were being made in, oh, South America, no one would make jokes about Asian manufacturing.

The Vietnam War aspect I'm not so sure of. I'm uncertain of its effect, and it might be complicated, because while the Vietnam veterans certainly had traumatic experiences caused by Asians, they also had a lot of opportunities to interact with other Asians, many of whom were nominally on their side. I'm not sure it gave rise to the same kind of 'pure' racist hatred and distrust that you might see in a war of straight-up occupation where the entire population wishes you weren't there.

[Also, pretty much any American who fought in Vietnam is over sixty years old, so this would be a declining factor in our society today]

[Komodo9Joe]

A much higher percentage of blacks and Latinos end up incarcerated than whites or Asians.

Firstly, incarceration rates are not wholly due to discrimination; discrimination may be the cause of a portion of arrests, but there are also many other factors, ones that generally play out more often, such as common disobedience of the law. Secondly, you keep returning to this point on how there are higher incarceration rates of Latinos and Blacks in comparison to Asians. Not only is this to be expected, as the Asian population in the U.S. is significantly below either of those two populations you just mentioned, but higher incarceration rates do not automatically equate into higher levels of discrimination being faced by an ethnic group (incarceration itself is a very specific subset of effects that can stem from discrimination). High incarceration rates have shown to be heavily tied to the economic status of an area with more arrests being made in poorer areas. The point being is that incarceration rates are tied to many factors, the most salient of which has shown to be the overall poverty level in a given area, and so passing off incarceration rates as a point to highlight the incommensurate level of discrimination between Latinos/blacks and Asians, especially given that the very populations of each of those demographics is tremendously different, makes little sense at all.

Blacks and Latinos measurably make way less money than whites and Asians.

Channel72, are you aware of the model minority stereotype surrounding Asians, a textbook concept in any american minority political science seminar, because you seem to be really doubling down on that stereotype right here. The model minority stereotype refers to the incidence of Asian success, particularly financially, being used to brush off any notions of discrimination/oppression against Asians occurring. As you are doing now, it points the finger towards the ends of financial success, and then retroactively works backwards, entirely incorrectly I might add, to assume that the starting point was optimal as well. Asians, like all of those other ethnic groups you mentioned, have historically faced discrimination as well, though less documented and represented, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, Korematsu vs U.S. etc, and any success achieved has been in spite of discrimination, not due to the absence of it... Now we can root these results in many reasons, such as a greater cultural stress on education and hard work in many Asian households, but to insinuate that Asians currently make more money than black and latinos because of reduced discrimination is entirely untrue. Currently, many Asians also face social discrimination, alongside the natural language and cultural barriers and the general unfamiliarity with many aspects of the protocol that makes up our bureaucracy.

And you really need to stop lumping in whites with Asians, Channel72, as I've repeatedly seen you link the two with a conjunction in opposition to the other minority groups you mention. The two are widely different, and especially for the sake of this discussion, should be separated. As many others in this thread have noted, the Asian demographic is truly an umbrella for many ethnic groups, all of which are presented with their own difficulties, and the label "Asian" is already quite eclectic to discuss. Loosely tying whites and Asians together out of data which shows that the two often do financially better is nonsensical, just as it is nonsensical to find some statistics which shows resemblance between any two ethnic groups, as anyone can be linked together this way. But perhaps you tie the two together out of ignorance of any discernible difference between the two monetarily speaking, which I suppose is why you brought up the topic of money. Let me dissuade you of that notion with the following passage conducted by the US federal Glass Ceiling Commission.

"In 1995, the US federal Glass Ceiling Commission found that Asian Americans are paid less than whites in most occupational categories—even after controlling for educational level, immigrant status and other variables. In strict social-science terms, the data is robust: Asian Americans and whites are not treated equally, and the difference can be attributed either to race or to nothing at all."

Interestingly, these are the same hardships I'd expect you to formulate on how blacks/Latinos have it far worse as they are repeatedly given less than their due, especially when having the same qualifications as their white counterparts. But this applies to Asians as well, and how even though Asians may be making more money when looking at the overall figures, they also face the same discriminatory practices that you have implied/expressed with blacks/Latinos.

Jews are also very loud when it comes to combating discrimination, especially given the fact that the Holocaust is still a living memory for some. Well... I'm Jewish - I don't fucking feel discriminated at all. In fact, being Jewish has only been an advantage, both economically and socially.

Good for you, but I have no idea where you are going with your personal experience, other than to bring up the usage of an anecdotal fallacy. If you have not felt discrimination--if you consider yourself to not be plagued with this problem--then, kudos to you, but you are only speaking on your behalf. In fact, it's ironic you bring up some comments on the Holocaust for that was precisely where I was about to go next: if, to your admittance, the Holocaust is still "a living memory for some," then there are many in the Jewish community who would appear to not share your perspective on being both "economically and socially advantaged" and still live everyday feeling the sting of discrimination. Regardless, this digression into discussing the plight of Jews is exactly that: a digression, and a giant red herring, that moves the discussion away from what it was based on (Asians) which is also the subject which you have wanted me to respond to.

But other than a couple of Seinfield gags and general racist humor (which applies to every ethnicity), I just don't see Asians facing anywhere near the kind of discrimination that blacks and Latinos do. For a visible minority, Asians seem to have it pretty good, socio-economically speaking. Discrimination against Asians is more like discrimination against Jews - you know, the funny kind of discrimination (A Jew walks into a bar, and then purchases the bar... ha! etc.), not the serious kind of discrimination where you actually fucking get passed over for a job because your last name is Lopez, or worse, profiled and harassed by the police. When is the last time a Wong, Li or Cohen got passed over for a high-paying job, let alone got arrested for being out too late? The fact that Harvard is apparently discriminating against Asians in their selection process is almost like the exception that proves the rule at this point. (Um... are you seriously complaining that the TOP fucking Ivy League school in the world won't let you in, when many blacks/Latinos are lucky if they can afford to go to their local community college in the Bronx ?? )

Here, you just fall apart completely, Channel72. Drawing conclusions from homogenized sitcoms and farces? Asking throwaway questions on if Asians have ever been declined a job due to an ethnically sounding last name? Wondering if Asians are angered by being declined from top colleges after grueling and tiresome work to achieve such qualifications, only to be turned down because of their ethnic group? Tonally, you just shifted from posting some valid inquiries into devolving into spouting a bunch of stereotypes that you've witnessed on TV, and yet again returning to that model minority stereotype surrounding Asians. After reading such a lazy, facetious paragraph, I'm not going to even bother truly articulating my answers to your questions here:

"When is the last time a Wong, Li or Cohen got passed over for a high-paying job, let alone got arrested for being out too late?"

Oh boy, you actually think this doesn't occur? Just because one doesn't hear about it on the news, or have featured articles written on it by beat writers, absolutely doesn't mean it hasn't occurred in a world having a 7 billion population that has operated in the postindustrial age for several decades by now...

"Are you seriously complaining that the TOP fucking Ivy League school in the world won't let you in, when many blacks/Latinos are lucky if they can afford to go to their local community college in the Bronx ?"

Let me clarify: it's actually not just Harvard that has been called into question, but many of the other elite colleges as well. And again, what type of question is that? Are you suggesting that one who is being actively discriminated against in the college application process has no basis in complaining. That one should just take the iniquity lying down. And this latter point, on blacks/Latinos being strapped to go to schools because of money: this is a problem that many Asians face as well, especially those who come here and are in the midst of pursuing the American dream, not those who have already accomplished it. Furthermore, Asians incorporate a wide variety of ethnic groups, and there are several specific demographic constituents of the Asian population that are living on the poverty line and face the costs of community college with increased difficulty as well. I've even attended a community college myself out of dire pecuniary straits. Poverty is universal in that it can be found in every ethnic group, so that point is moot.

But again, I'm not Asian. If you are, perhaps you can help dispel my ignorance here and enlighten me in regard to your plight.

One doesn't have to be Asian, Channel72, to speak on the Asian plight but the discriminatory aspect of the Asian plight often plays out the same way as it does with all of the other ethnic groups you mentioned. The increasing numbers of Asians who have overcome the system aren't truly different than those in other ethnic groups who have done the same: many of the root challenges are the same, even though the results may be different. Regardless, I don't want this discussion to be submerged into a wider discussion of race, and I would like to ask for your specific thoughts on the passage I posted in the OP concerning colleges and application review.

[Channel72]

Well firstly, the way racial discrimination manifests in a society is obviously pretty complex. But at least in the US, we might try and attempt to categorize it more or less as follows:

We've got (1) Lingering Old World Racism. This type is almost cute, it's so pathetic. This is like the first-generation Irish grandpa who doesn't approve that his granddaughter is marrying an Italian guy. This is barely a large scale problem anymore, but certainly still exists in more conservative, rural areas. (It's actually also a problem among urban minority enclaves... like Orthodox Jewish families who are horrified about the idea of their son/daughter marrying a dirty Gentile, etc.)

Then we've got (2) Pop Culture Racism - generally, "acceptable" racist humor - I say acceptable because most people just accept it because they think it's funny, or because it broadly conforms to their anecdotal experiences. You know... Asians are good at math and can't drive, Koreans own laundromats, Jews are cheap, etc. A lot of these are harmless, but some occasionally cross over into harmful territory (Arabs are terrorists, and a black guy with an expensive car automatically means drug dealer, etc.)

Then we've got (3) - institutionalized, self-perpetuating, economic discrimination. This specifically affects blacks and Latinos, and not really any other group in the US to the same extent. This is the endless cycle of poverty and crime, where a young black/Latino is born in inner-city Detroit/Philly/Newark whatever, grows up with shitty education and crime everywhere, starts seriously considering that crime might be a viable option because it's everywhere and he knows one or two successful criminals who were childhood friends, he gets arrested, gets out of jail, has no real skills, can't get employed, commits more crimes, etc. Or even if he doesn't ever commit a single crime and tries his best, he can't get into a good college because the inner-city shithole PS-73 school in the South Bronx was barely functional - he gets a minimum wage job, is constantly profiled by police, and whenever he visits a 7-11 in suburbia, the white customers get a bit antsy. At best, he tries really fucking hard and gets a scholarship to some community college, and then still lands a job that many middle-class whites and Asians would look down on.

Of all the above, (3) is so radically worse than (1) and (2), it's almost misleading to talk about all of them in the same sentence using the same word - "discrimination" - to describe the phenomenon. (3) is a deep-rooted, horrible, dark problem, with a complex historical etiology. The fact is that someone in a high socio-economic bracket really can't complain about anything like (3)-type discrimination, no matter how many racist jokes they have to put up with. Quality of life is all about economics - low socio-economic status feeds a discriminatory system, creating an intolerable feedback loop which affects millions of people.

Okay, so I see you replied as I was typing that. So, as for your specific points:

Not only is this to be expected, as the Asian population in the U.S. is significantly below either of those two populations you just mentioned, but higher incarceration rates do not automatically equate into higher levels of discrimination being faced by an ethnic group (incarceration itself is a very specific subset of effects that can stem from discrimination)

No clue what your point is. Blacks and Latinos face much higher incarceration rates, percentage-wise, than Asians. This has nothing to do with population numbers. Again, see the endless cycle/feedback loop of poverty, crime, discrimination, and then more crime and discrimination. Higher incarceration rates are a direct effect of institutional discrimination.

Asians, like all of those other ethnic groups you mentioned, have historically faced discrimination as well, though less documented and represented, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, Korematsu vs U.S. etc, and any success achieved has been in spite of discrimination, not due to the absence of it.

Yeah, and? Yes, early Asian immigrants were major targets for discrimination. So were the Irish and the Jews. What's your point again?

And you really need to stop lumping in whites with Asians, Channel72, as I've repeatedly seen you link the two with a conjunction in opposition to the other minority groups you mention.

I link them only economically - insofar as they both make way more money than blacks and Latinos on average. Other than that I am not linking them.

But this applies to Asians as well, and how even though Asians may be making more money when looking at the overall figures, they also face the same discriminatory practices that you have implied/expressed with blacks/Latinos.

But not anywhere to the same extent as blacks/Latinos. I said already that every visible minority is going to experience some racism in the US, especially outside of urban areas. But we're talking about degrees here. Clearly blacks and Latinos have it much worse. Unless you're going to deny that, I'm not sure what your point is.

The rest of your post basically makes the same point: Asians experience discrimination, etc. I get that. Every visible minority does. But most immigrant groups that came to the US weren't ex-slaves, and they eventually were able to overcome the initial discrimination they faced after stepping off the boat, over a few generations, and propel their children into a higher socio-economic stratum. The visible minority groups had more of a difficult time than the Irish/Italians/Jews, because humans care about skin pigmentation differences for various evolutionary reasons. And of course even today visible minorities will always be easier targets (even though historically the worse genocides usually did not target particularly visible minorities, i.e. Jews, Armenians, Tutsis). But among all the visible minorities, blacks and Latinos in particular are trapped in a povery/crime feedback loop which is much worse than anything you're talking about.

If your only point is that Asians experience discrimination, I already conceded before you said anything. If your point is that I should actually care as much as I care about the discrimination faced by blacks and Latinos, well, as they say on SD.net, go fuck yourself.

[Komodo9Joe]

Asians, like all of those other ethnic groups you mentioned, have historically faced discrimination as well, though less documented and represented, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, Korematsu vs U.S. etc, and any success achieved has been in spite of discrimination, not due to the absence of it.

Yeah, and? Yes, early Asian immigrants were major targets for discrimination. So were the Irish and the Jews. What's your point again?

My point is what I wrote: you can read it again if you are unclear. And I never differentiated the form of discrimination from that of Jews or the Irish. Why would I when I am precisely trying to argue that type of discrimination has been felt unilaterally, rather than centered against a particular ethnic group, blacks/latinos, as you argue?

And you really need to stop lumping in whites with Asians, Channel72, as I've repeatedly seen you link the two with a conjunction in opposition to the other minority groups you mention.

I link them only economically - insofar as they both make way more money than blacks and Latinos on average. Other than that I am not linking them.

And I noted the form in which you linked them in my reply, and illustrated why suck a linkage cannot be made, or rather, cannot be made to signify anything meaningful. Studies have shown that Asians repeatedly make less money than whites, even when presenting the same qualifications, so a distinction between blacks/Latinos and Asians/whites is a misleading breakdown. Furthermore, as I have repeatedly stated, the label "Asian" comprises of many ethnic groups, each which has a varying income level, so it's even more imperative to draw the lines between groups rather than groups of groups.

But this applies to Asians as well, and how even though Asians may be making more money when looking at the overall figures, they also face the same discriminatory practices that you have implied/expressed with blacks/Latinos.

But not anywhere to the same extent as blacks/Latinos. I said already that every visible minority is going to experience some racism in the US, especially outside of urban areas. But we're talking about degrees here. Clearly blacks and Latinos have it much worse. Unless you're going to deny that, I'm not sure what your point is.

Of course all minorities experience some discrimination (that goes without saying), but the point I was articulating, which you appear to have missed again, was how Asians also face the forms of discrimination common to the forms faced by blacks/latinos, especially in regards to the point you bring up on wages earned.

Moreover, you keep on reiterating how "blacks and Latinos have it far worse" yet you fail to provide any hard evidence of the difference in degree, aside from constructing scenarios and cycles that signify discrimination, which I have shown also play out with those in the Asian community. If you truly would like to argue this point on the difference in degree, then first explicate the discriminatory practices against blacks/latinos, and signify why you believe it should be seen as a separate form of discrimination befalling only blacks/Latinos.

But most immigrant groups that came to the US weren't ex-slaves, and they eventually were able to overcome the initial discrimination they faced after stepping off the boat, over a few generations, and propel their children into a higher socio-economic stratum. The visible minority groups had more of a difficult time than the Irish/Italians/Jews, because humans care about skin pigmentation differences for various evolutionary reasons. And of course even today visible minorities will always be easier targets (even though historically the worse genocides usually did not target particularly visible minorities, i.e. Jews, Armenians, Tutsis).

I don't even know what you're talking about here: you seem to be arguing that the more physically distinguishable minorities have generated far more severe forms of discrimination. If you are arguing that, which it's very unclear to tell, then there have been many cases of Asians falling subject to that same visibly discernible-generated discrimination as well--in fact, there is a very infamous case of South Asians also being declared by the Supreme Court as too dark and in need of separation from whites (the litigants were Hindus of Indian ancestry, if my memory serves).

But among all the visible minorities, blacks and Latinos in particular are trapped in a povery/crime feedback loop which is much worse than anything you're talking about.

Again, you keep on restating this without going into any specifics which point out differentials between those in the black/Latino community and in the Asian community. Even in your constructed scenarios, which I might add are not absolutes, the general problem seems to emerge from poor neighborhoods, bad crowds, and lack of funds which any minority can experience and become systematically entrapped in.

If your only point is that Asians experience discrimination, I already conceded before you said anything. If your point is that I should actually care as much as I care about the discrimination faced by blacks and Latinos, well, as they say on SD.net, go fuck yourself.

No, my point is not that you should care--I couldn't care less if you care or not. The point of this thread was made very clear in my OP; where you came in was on the talk of "degrees" and "levels" of discrimination, neither of which I'm still clear on how they relate to the subject of this thread, but of which I still responded to, especially in regards to some of the points you made on the difference in income levels and such. On that last part; hadn't heard that phrase here yet, but it's good to know.