Boston Latin ordered to turn over data, notes on racial makeup of students admitted to Harvard

They're racist all right. Never said they weren't. You may just in a position where you don't have to be officially racist but you don't have to deal with or compete with black people. That's where I am anyway.

The understanding of conflict and race however is far from reality, and feeds on itself. It will never be solved if we continue this way.

Karl Marx says inequality causes conflict. If this was true then the poor would be killing the rich primarily. The evidence however is that real hatred, killing and jealousy, happens among people who are more equal than not. The Marxists such as the Frankfurt School have to make excuses for this behavior, finding false consciousness etc. basically trying to explain why killers and haters are attacking the wrong target.

An alternative explanation called mimetic theory is that because humans are imitative creatures, we want what the people close to us have. But the resource, especially the best thing (best girl, best house, spot at BLS, spot at Harvard) is limited, so we focus on that more and more and it becomes the center of our rivalry. Eventually we lose sight of the object and become focused on the competition to the exclusion of everything else.

So you see how more equality leads more people to desire the same things. I don't doubt that there were at one time historically black colleges with professors as good as the ones at Harvard and kids as smart as the Harvard kids. Now that we have basically got rid of those things, everyone instead, blacks, whites, asians etc all became focused on Harvard, way beyond what is justified by the quality of education there.

Are there ways societies use to control the conflicts? Yes. And I will tell you if you can stop being a smarty.

...was forced busing. It alienated vast numbers of working-class voters from the Democratic Party and may have made Ronald Reagan President. It certainly won Massachusetts for Reagan. It hurt cities by encouraging white flight; it never delivered the benefits to African Americans it was supposed to deliver.

The real problem wasn't where kids were going to school; it was how schools were -- and largely, still are -- funded. If you live in a rich town, you have excellent schools; if you live in a less affluent one, or in one of the blighted former industrial cities, you're out of luck. The dollars, not the kids, should have been the focus. Forcing social reform at gunpoint rarely results in anything good, and always triggers a backlash. The Democratic Party, and indeed the whole country, is still paying for that mistake today.

Success comes more often from being in the right place at the right time than from "busting one's ass" more than the next person.

I'll give you an example: when I was in college in the 1970's, there was a small group of people associated with the college radio station who had started a computer software company. They wrote software for Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers (DEC was a major employer based in Maynard). There was fellow in my dorm who was writing software for 8080- and Z-80-based microcomputers. My friends turned up their noses at those and called them toys. My friends "busted their asses" just as hard as that other fellow did, but you've never heard of any of them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Minicomputers weren't the future; DEC, Wang, Data General, and Prime Computer are all out of business today.

That other fellow, writing software for "toys"? His name was Bill Gates.

You mean, the people who are too dim to understand that they are being replaced by robots and that maybe, just maybe, they should buckle down and study up?

And that right there is the condescending smugness people have been talking about, the attitude that fuels the entire worldwide populo-fascist backlash we're seeing right now.

Didn't say everybody should get into Harvard or everybody should go to BLS

Students should not risk getting beat up or robbed going to the other high schools. And you know that's one reason why parents want their kids in the exam schools.

Why do we accept that only those who achieve at certain academic subjects should be assured as far as safety and social recognition goes ?

"Hard work" never got anyone anywhere without a whole lot of other things going right at the same time, and the only people invoking that tired old trope are the ones who were born on third base and think they hit a triple. My wife's school, and the middle school around the corner from me, are full of kids who are busting their asses harder than you or I will ever do, and they're not all going to see the inside of an Ivy. You can disagree that affirmative action is the way to address structural inequality, but can we please skip the Horatio Alger bullshit?

so long as it's based on actual qualifications and performance and not, say, your accent or where you summered or prepped or whether granddad was a partner in the firm ;-)

"Whites", or European-Americans, are an ethnic group, like Puerto Ricans, Brazilian-Americans, or Chinese-Americans. There is actually more than one "white" group, just as there is more than one "Hispanic" group. The United States is something like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, many ethnicities living under a common sovereignty, not "one nation under God, indivisible". When one group perceives that it is being treated less favorably than another, conflict arises. As with many social conflicts, it is the perception that matters. The media, who largely create public perceptions in this country, bear a lot of responsibility, I think.

psycobabble behind the Bell Curve and or eugenics.

Are also used to the same effect.

Look into the research on test scores: "achievement" tests are most heavily and robustly correlated with parental income and education levels. Colleges have also found them to be somewhat underwhelming as predictors of academic success - let alone ability to handle college life (maturity, self-sufficiency, etc.)

Test scores are no different than more qualitative indices in that regard.

... he'll just drag you down to the mud where he lives and then beat you with experience.

This is a man who has clearly suffered from a lack of people telling him to go fuck himself throughout his blinkered, bigoted life, and I aim to right that terrible wrong.

That's entirely possible.

There's an equally possible explanation, consistent with a lot of modern psychological theory, is that such personality disorders result from a lack of affection shown to the individual during childhood. (and, sadly, that there's little you can do in adulthood to remedy it.)