links for 2008-09-08

"The message is always the same: whites save animals. Natives threaten animals, or at the very most provide manual labor for whites in their efforts to save animals. The network is particularly tone-deaf in the matter of Chimp Eden, which is set in South Africa for heaven's sake, and yet the sanctuary staff's racial makeup or history is not considered worth noting. "

"A "holistic" approach is supposed to be one that factored in the obstacles individual students faced — in particular, family poverty and parents' education levels. At UCLA, the parents of Vietnamese-American applicants are on average poorer and less educated than the parents of African-American applicants. But instead of seeing their admission rates go up under the holistic system, Vietnamese kids' rates plunged, from 28.6 percent to 21.4 percent."

"A new study in the journal Social Science Quarterly found that campus racial and ethnic diversity is important in predicting friendship heterogeneity, and that minorities have higher predicted friendship diversity than whites."