> in a party where the folks who think the SATs are racist

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.

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Since no one else is defending race-aware admissions policies, I'll do it here.

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, and education is "the great leveler" and we want to level people from all walks of life as much as we can, given scarce resources. It's better for society.

The right characterizes these racially representative cohorts as unfair, because they believe they should be instead constructed from test scores. They'll say merit, but their only measure is test scores which aren't good indicators of merit because of systemic racism. If we went with this system, we would retrench and amplify existing biases and inequalities.

The current regime is doing pretty good at representation (2019) [Wiki US race] [Undergraduate race]:

AAPI in college/US: 6.89%/6.1%

Blacks in college/US: 12.65%/12.4%

Whites in college/US: 55.12%/60.1%

Hispanics in college/US: 21.08%/18.3%

While not perfect, college undergraduate racial makeup mostly tracks US racial makeup. The main difference is Whites are underrepresented. This is a success story. 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. We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

And to be clear, what these policies certainly are not is a long con to bar AAPI from undergraduate programs. If that were true, they wouldn't be overrepresented.

> When I say, "Democrats think that standardized tests are racist," I'm not complaining about some Sunrise tweet. It actually happened at my high school

This is a great example. The judge in this case said exactly this: "The discussion of TJ admissions was infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception" and "The Board’s policy was designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans". Clearly, like you, he's on the side of test scores, rather than racial representation.

But another way of describing what administrators tried to do at your school is they changed the admissions process in pursuit of a more racially representative student body, and relying on standardized testing would have run counter to their purpose, as it disadvantages the races of students they wanted to increase the numbers of.

This isn't a Democratic idea, this is a well-known admissions problem. When MIT announced they were reinstating their SAT/ACT requirements, they wrote a thoroughly cited explanation about why, noting that "research... shows correlations [with socioeconomic status] for just about every... factor admissions officers can consider... we always have to adjust for context". [MIT] It's a really interesting read; I recommend it.

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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). But this is a complex issue with society-wide implications, and we're debating it down in the muck with cheap rhetorical tricks, name-calling, and hand-wavey conspiracy theories. There's a high-level debate to be had about how we allocate educational resources in the US, and probably even about who ought to decide that. But racially representative cohorts have been outstandingly good for the US; we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss them as racist and unfair. Fairness has lots of layers and if we ourselves are to have any hope of being fair, we have to appreciate its complexity.

[Biden education]: https://joebiden.com/education/

[SAT stats]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_226.10.a...

[Wiki US race]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

[Undergraduate race]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastFacts/display.asp?id=98

[MIT]: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...