The first thing to be said about this is that of course Harvard does discriminate against Asian-Americans. Ron Unz crunched the numbers j ust five years ago over at The American Conservative in a brilliant piece titled “The Myth of American Meritocracy” [November 28, 2012] You can also find the essay in Ron’s book of that title.

The centerpiece of Ron’s essay: a killer graph comparing the steady rise from 1990 to 2011 of the Asian-American college-age population with the dead-flat proportions of Asian-American admittances to Ivy League schools, held down firmly in a tight band between thirteen and eighteen percent.

Of course they are discriminating. Who doesn’t know it?

Needless to say, I’m going to take a much darker view. East Asians have higher mean IQ than whites, and of course far higher than mestizos and blacks. They especially excel at disciplines needing visuo-spatial skills. IQ aside, it seems likely they also have higher proportions of the personality characteristics that suit a person to high intellectual endeavor.

If Harvard and other high-prestige universities practice color-blind admissions, therefore, Asian-Americans will be way over-represented, and way-way over-represented in fields like math and computer science.

Think of the kind of resentment, anger, and bitterness that blacks feel when they see other races succeeding more than they do. Wouldn’t color-blind admissions just add a new layer of resentment in American society—with whites (known as “Americans” until the 1965 Immigration Act) watching Asians flood into the Ivies, displacing them?

Immigration patriots in the early 20th century strove to keep out East Asian immigrants, not because they “hated” them, as the infantile language of our current discourse would tell you, or because they thought them an inferior race, but because they feared mass immigration of East Asians would produce an overclass, generating discontent and resentment among legacy Americans.

I’m sure she would respond with a stream of race-denialist blather. “There are no innate differences between the races,” she’d protest. “That’s a horrible thing to suggest! We just need the right social policies. Fix the schools! Save the black family! —”

We’ve heard it all a thousand times. Race denialism is state dogma in the 21st-century West. No one with a gig writing op-eds for the New York Post is going to turn race-realist.

Unfortunately, race-realism is true and race-denialism is a lie. That being the case, we have to choose between two evils: unfairness in college admissions, or higher levels of social discord.

To date we have chosen Door Number One. Are we quite sure that wasn’t the better choice—the lesser of two evils?

If you go to a doctor with a bacterial infection—an infected blister perhaps—he can give you an antibiotic, and you’ll be cured. If you go to him with a broken leg, he’ll get it set for you, and soon you’ll be playing tennis again. Doctors can fix things and cure things.

If, however, you go to the doctor with arthritis, or diabetes, or a leukemia like the one I have, he can’t fix it, he can’t cure it. What he can do is manage it: set you up so that the pain and inconvenience are the least possible. We can’t cure those conditions, but we can manage them, minimizing the trouble they cause us.

America’s race problem is like that. There’s no cure, although the race denialists breezily assure us there is. We can’t fix the schools to produce equal racial outcomes. God knows, we’ve been trying for decades, with essentially zero results. W e can’t make whites as smart as East Asians; Mother Nature’s standing in the way.

What we can do—what we do do—is manage the situation, to keep social discord at a minimum. Race quotas in college admissions is one aspect of that management. It works pretty well.

There: I just said it again. We’ve foolishly, heedlessly made a mess for ourselves with these decades of mass immigration.

Now there are two things we have to do:

One: We have to manage the mess as best we can.

Two: We have to stop making it worse.