I am NOT a racist!

Dear Friends: I keep telling everyone I'm not a racist, just a culturalist............, (and a bigot) but apparently I'm having a hard time convincing some people!

Never mind that study a professor did at Western University here in London a while ago that claimed Black's were slightly less intelligent (on average) than whites but better physically, (and musically) .......Whites were in the middle and plain ordinary hum drum just like white bread..........., and Orientals were better mentally but sucked at physical stuff! (Like driving)

I'm not going to claim any of that is true to keep myself out of trouble, but I can tell you that individual cultures are both good, bad and indifferent....... just like most people are! (I'll give you a few examples: German industriousness, British bulldog stubborn, Italian and French romanticism, Nordic sensibilities, East Indian tech savvy and Chinese cleverness! There are lots more, but most of them are not so nice....... or outright rude, so I will leave them all alone except to give this one example.)

Back at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century (1900) there were three groups at the bottom of the cultural totem pole, (If I can use an Indian term!) Black's were no better than slaves, Indians were savages and the Chinese were...... well they were just slant eyed Chinks, that's all!

Now since then, here in the twenty first century, let's have a look at these groups again.

I'll leave yo to make up your own mind about the Blacks and Indians, but I would like to show you an article about the Orientals! (Their culture makes them want to be smart, which results in a form of discrimination, reverse affirmative action.)

By Alia Wong: The Atlantic

Every year, Harvard’s admissions officers are charged with whittling a batch of 40,000 applicants down to a bare-bones selection to fill the institution’s roughly 1,600 freshman seats. Those officers can’t just set a high bar for test scores and GPAs to arrive at that selection; far too many candidates boast those qualifications. Plus, even if that arithmetic were possible, Harvard prides itself as an institution where students learn from each other in addition to their professors. Building each freshman class is, in turn, both an art and a science—one that effectively requires admissions officers to exercise a combination of number-crunching and intuition.

An organization representing Asian Americans who were at some point rejected from Harvard is suing the school for that art-and-science approach. The group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), recently reignited tensions around that approach with a new legal filing that it says confirms suspicions that the university’s admissions practices discriminate on the basis of race. The documents, filed on Friday in federal court by SFFA, could influence admissions policies at universities across the country; the case is slated to go to trial in October.


One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likeability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.

The news media have largely fixated on whether the evidence contained in the filing is the “smoking gun” needed in the longstanding crusade to crack down on admissions practices at the country’s premier institution of higher learning, practices that until now the school hadn’t disclosed to the public. Whether the evidence is incriminating isn’t clear, but it does reveal how tricky it is to assign value to personality traits in college admissions.

In offering a glimpse into how the emphasis on those traits might favor some races over others, the filing points to a puzzle whose solution could be integral to the quest to get affirmative action right: Is it possible to define a characteristic as intangible and subjective as good personality in a way that protects students against people’s deep-seated, and often subconscious, biases?

“However you measure these things—whatever you do [in the admissions process]—is going to privilege one group and disadvantage another group,” said Natasha Warikoo, an associate professor of education at Harvard who wrote the book The Diversity Bargain, which explores the role of race at elite universities. “There’s no such thing as a perfect admissions system that leads to ‘a meritocracy.’” Warikoo wasn’t involved in this lawsuit.

SFFA’s filing includes a report by Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist, that delves into the process by which Harvard rates applicants in five main categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal, and overall. Arcidiacono shows that, after narrowing down applicants to those with the strongest objective academic qualifications, Asian Americans were far more likely than blacks or Hispanics to receive a low personality score from admissions officers.

The analysis juxtaposes the Asian Americans’ personality scores from admissions officers with the relatively high personality ratings given by alumni interviewers, as well as with the relatively positive feedback provided to Harvard by applicants’ teachers and counselors, for those same students.

Arcidiacono concludes that this apparent personality-score phenomenon leads to what he describes “the Asian-American penalty”; if that so-called penalty were removed, he contends, Asian Americans’ admission rate would increase from 5.2 percent to 19.2 percent. Is it possible to justify the glaring discrepancies identified by Arcidiacono?

Should Harvard admit one out of every five Asian American applicants to ensure its admissions practices are “fair”?

SO THERE YA HAVE IT FOLKS, WE CAN'T SAY THIS IS RACIAL IN TONE, BUT WE CAN DEFINITELY SAY IT HAS A CULTURAL BIAS!

The way I see it anyway!

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