A friend of mine competed at an international science fair a few years ago. Thousands of students from all over the world came to an event hosted by INTEL to demonstrate and explain the research they had conducted over their time in high school. The people there not only had to beat out everyone in their school, but also their state, province, and country. Many of them came from countries like Germany or Japan where the competition is brutal.
Anyway, it took him four years but he finally made it there. After four years of trying, and improving his research, he got to internationals. His booth was set up next to an Islamic freshman girl from an African country. He got to know her well during the completion. Well she was somewhat charismatic, the quality of her project was terrible. She did not use the correct vocabulary for her field, did not have the technical knowledge, and was a poor speaker. Her project, while being neat and thoughtful, was an order of magnitude bellow the competition. Well the Russian team to her left was building anti-cancer drugs using advanced organic chemistry, she was making the equivalent of potato batteries.
You can imagine the shock of everyone when that 14-16 year old Muslim girl from a 3rd world country was given a place award over all her competition. Well her peers where calculating the binding affinity of small molecule ligands to protein receptors, she was not even using mathematics or standard units in her project.
INTEL Is not concerned with finding the best minds. It is not interested in figuring out by objective criteria who conducted the best research and is most devoted to their field. What INTEL wants is a photo shoot to make their brand look good. Having a bunch of autistic German kids and a small platoon of upper class Chinese people winning first place every year is not good for the brand.
Those people, who should have had the chance to compete for that award, no longer have that opportunity. They wont be getting to put that on their resume so they can work at SpaceX or Boeing. They are not high enough in the progressive stack.
He also told me about how the award and opening ceremonies were hosted by INTEL diversity officers, and they had a segment for celebrating AOC by name, with her photo on a 50 foot projector.
There is no hope. It will only get worse. I know for a fact that most of the people who won first at the competition more than deserved it, but over time that percentage will drop. Eventually it will matter how progressive your project is, not how much ground it breaks in physics, chemistry, or mathematics.
That’s in direct contradiction to what you said in the OP. If less than 10% is one race in the last 4 years no one is going to accuse the university of bias, and if they did they would be laughed off.
If this is true (which it isn’t) and your friend has evidence he should have immediately brought it to the press. Someone will take his case pro bono.
It is not about giving POCs and degenerates spots, its about taking them away from the 'problematics'. I am not sure if OP's story is true, but that statistic has nothing to do with it. If there are 3 white people out of a class of 25, to them that is 3 too many.
