> SATs are racist (to tptacek's point I'm on the progressive side, but I do think Biden agrees with me here [Biden education]). I don't know how you look at the data [SAT stats] and come to any other conclusion. We can discuss how much is solely the SAT vs. institutional racism, but the facts are pretty clear.

What’s the operative mechanism for that “racism?” And how on earth did white people design a “racist” test on which they underperform Asians?

> Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes

I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.

> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.

I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).

> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers. Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.

And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.

> I get this is frustrating for folks when they're denied admission, and I definitely understand to some degree the feeling of unfairness that comes with it being because of who you are (race, gender).

That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities. “Racial representation” for example is something white people want more than anyone else. Listen to “Nice White Parents.” Something you hear over and over is minority parents saying they don’t care so much about race-balanced schools. What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Justice Thomas has said similar things. Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice. It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school. And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment. Prop 16 in California lost every single Hispanic-majority county. But white progressives love racial balancing, and continue to advocate it over minority opinion, because they end up in charge of systems of racial gerrymandering. When a minority kid writes a diversity essay, or a minority academic writes a diversity statement for tenure, it’s overwhelmingly white progressives that will be in charge of evaluating that against their worldview.

And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line. This became glaring to me as someone from a Muslim country during the last few years. You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think. That was mediated through folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, who gained prominence not because they authentically represent what American Muslims want—remember these are folks who preferred Bush over Gore not that long ago—but a version of Muslim identity that flatters and appeals to the white progressives that control the media and platforms.