You seem to be cherry-picking biased sources to support your conclusions.

You write: “You seem to suggest that affirmative action is a definitive factor in the disparity against Asian students, but the facts tell a more complicated story like always: http://www.asian-nation.org/affirmative-action.shtml#sthash.tH25HT4s.dpbsz.”

That article you linked to is pretty much a primer meant to gaslight Asians into supporting affirmative action, when it is completely not in their interests. I suggest you educate yourself about affirmative action, its pernicious history and its sad present-day reality. This article is a good start. It documents in some detail how affirmative action was originally designed to keep the percentages of Jews at elite universities down, and how it’s now doing the exact same thing to Asians. Here is a relevant excerpt about how affirmative action has impacted Asians:

Harvard and “all other Ivy League schools . . . inexplicably enroll Asian Americans in remarkably similar numbers [about 16% of the student body] year after year after year.” These figures have remained constant in the 14 percent to 19 percent range, even though, according to one study of “three of the most selective Ivy League colleges” cited in the lawsuit, Asian-Americans constitute 27 percent of the applicants to these schools — and 45 percent of the applicants with the top SAT scores.

This may be contrasted with the much higher percentages of Asians at top schools where affirmative action is banned:

Among elite colleges, one school stands out conspicuously in its Asian enrollment trends: the California Institute of Technology. Caltech is the only top school that rejects the use of racial preferences as well as “legacy” admissions for the children of alumni, instead selecting students based almost entirely on academic merit. Asian enrollment at Caltech has kept pace with the growth of the Asian college cohort and now stands at over 40 percent of the student body. Asians similarly account for about 40 percent of the population at the five most selective campuses in the University of California system — Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, and Irvine — where the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 barred racial preferences. These figures further support the inference of discrimination by Harvard and the other Ivies.

(Incidentally, I am personally against all “legacy” admissions as well. I believe, as I said previously, that admissions officers should not have access to information concerning the applicant’s race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation or even their name.)

You write: “The source of your article on drug use actually disagrees: the report says, “The prevalence of drug use is only slightly higher among blacks than whites for some illicit drugs and slightly lower for others; the difference is not substantial. There is also little evidence, when all drug types are considered, that blacks sell drugs more often than whites.” http://archive.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2013SummNatFindDetTables/NationalFindings/NSDUHresults2013.htm#2.7"

What you call a “slightly higher” rate of drug use among blacks is actually only slightly higher because the overall numbers are so low in general (9.2% vs. 11.3%). But the percentage disparity between those numbers is 23 percent. I’ll quote the source’s summary of the data so that you don’t think I’m making this up:

As you would expect, the age group that uses “illicit drugs” the most is 18–25, and males use drugs much more than females. But look at the racial groups: Not much uniformity there either. That darn model minority, the Asians, are there again busting the curve for everyone else, with only 3.7 percent using, versus 9.2 percent for all groups, which is also the white total. But blacks are at 11.3 percent, meaning that they use drugs at a rate 23 percent higher than the general population and whites.

If the percentage disparity for illicit drug use by race is 23 percent, then you would also expect the disparity in the rates at which people are arrested and incarcerated for such drug use to be around 23 percent. And it should be even higher because of the issue I’d mentioned — that illicit drug use by blacks tends to occur outdoors rather than indoors and in more heavily policed high-crime urban areas. There’s nothing remotely surprising or disturbing here. This isn’t about any sort of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. Poor people are heavily overrepresented among drug users, criminals, and those arrested and incarcerated for crimes, and blacks are disproportionately poor in America. So the issues isn’t racist law enforcement; the issue is black poverty.

You write: “Why is it that Whites apply to more colleges than Blacks or Latinos? Systematically, poorer neighborhoods (disproportionately Black and Latino) do not give them the infrastructure to apply to colleges like Berkeley. Many of the students do not have working computers at home and such neighborhoods are more likely to have very few computers in school — this means that when college applications were due, the students line up around the building for days, waiting to use the one working computer. Many of them do not have any honors or AP classes, so the Valedictorian graduates with a lower GPA and very often goes to a community college. Such factors abound and they are not exclusive to impoverished schools. When a population is poor and overly-imprisoned, it doesn’t create an atmosphere for kids to go to college.”

I don’t disagree with any of that. It’s also something that’s been true of almost every single newly arrived immigrant group in America. These groups came to the U.S. poor, were widely discriminated against and thought genetically inferior, lived in ethnic ghettos, did not get the benefit of any affirmative action (and were, in fact, often hurt by affirmative action policies), and yet they fought their way into the middle class and beyond, whereupon the discrimination against them largely dissipated. I’m talking about wave after wave of immigration, whether it be Irish, Italians (and other Catholics), Greeks, Eastern Europeans like myself, Jews, Chinese, Indians, you name it ….

I live in Chinatown in New York City. I know firsthand that many of the Chinese immigrants who arrive (many illegally) live in crowded apartments, often with a whole family in one room, work low-wage jobs, etc. They live in an impoverished home environment. And yet their children often wind up going to the best universities in America and making it into the upper middle class. The exact same thing is true of Russians like myself. My family came to the U.S. with a grand total of $400 (because that’s all you were allowed to take with you when you left the former Soviet Union), and I grew up with my parents and grandparents crowded into a small apartment, went to the Head Start program and attended public schools in lower income areas until my parents managed to get better jobs and move with me to a more middle class town. My experience is common — indeed, nearly universal — among the many Russian immigrants I know. And yet, this was during the height of the Cold War during the 1980s, when Russians in America faced all kinds of negative stereotypes, constant taunts from other kids, and so on.

My point is that all the claims we hear about “systemic discrimination” is, to me, mostly just a lot of whining by people who don’t want to take responsibility for themselves and, instead, want to blame others for their problems. There is no question in my mind that black Americans have had it worse than everyone else because of the particular history America has with slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, etc. I don’t doubt for a second that all of this has greatly contributed to poverty, broken families, low education levels, high crime and the rest. But I also don’t doubt for a second that the dumb government policies of earlier decades that created dependency on benefits and a disincentive to high achievement have served as enablers and created further cycles of poverty and dysfunction. It’s high time to stop whining and start working. Do what every other underprivileged group has done throughout American history when told it was inferior: show the bigots they’re wrong. Work your way into the middle class. Start stressing education and achievement, a marked contrast with what sociologists have termed black “cool-pose culture,” which stresses the exact opposite. Race-baiters and finger-pointers like Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates are, in my view, actually harming African Americans by stressing — and, thus, reinforcing — racial divisions and encouraging this epidemic of blame within the black community and clueless elite liberals who think they’re helping out by adopting the black cause the way some spoiled little rich girl adopts a sad looking puppy from the pound to make her feel better about herself.

As I’ve said countless times in posts on Medium, discrimination and racism against blacks will end when blacks are fully integrated into the middle class and beyond, when they and whites are interacting on equal terms in the same churches, communities, schools and workplaces. This is the way it worked for every other previously poor group in America. You can’t put the cart before the horse and expect racism to end first, when the reality is that the would-be racist told not to be a racist still sees the poor, uneducated, uncouth, pot-smoking black thug sauntering by on the street every day. You can’t shut your eyes to what you see. Reality has to change, and only when reality changes will our perceptions follow suit.

This brings me to your point about color-blindness: “On Color-blindness. Although this belief sounds intuitively plausible, the reality is that color-blind policies often put racial minorities at a disadvantage. For instance, all else being equal, color-blind seniority systems tend to protect White workers against job layoffs, because senior employees are usually White (Ezorsky, 1991). Likewise, color-blind college admissions favor White students because of their earlier educational advantages. Unless pre-existing inequities are corrected or otherwise taken into account, color-blind policies do not correct racial injustice — they reinforce it.”

The first mistake you’re making is in speaking in terms of “racial minorities.” This term, “minorities” or “people of color” or whatever formulation they come up with next, is, again, an attempt to gaslight other people into identifying themselves with the African-American cause and create a false dichotomy between whites and minorities when the real dichotomy is between African-Americans and everyone else. East Asians and Indians are technically “minorities” but are disproportionately successful in America. Nigerians and Cubans and Iranians are all technically “minorities” but are disproportionately successful in America. So let’s stop being overbroad, which just distorts reality, and let’s talk about what everyone knows is the real problem: African-Americans (not all people with dark skin, not Africans, not Indians, not West Indians, but specifically African-Americans). Some of the issues you’re identifying with color-blind policies are real, yes, but the solution to those issues is hard work, integration and time. As I’ve described in my article on this issue, race-conscious policies (and race consciousness in general) actually create many more problems than they solve, and the #1 problem they create is to increase racism. As I discussed in that article, race-blindness, the rallying cry of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, was slowly but surely resulting in progress in ending racial animosity and polarization over the course of the decades since its heydey, and then we started getting impatient and going in the opposite direction (race consciousness), which has resulted, in a very short period of time, in a dramatic rollback of much of the progress that had been made. We need to stop our race-baiting and stay the course. We need poor and middle-class whites and blacks working together to advance their common interests against regressive policies of corporate cronyism championed by Country Club Republicans like the Bushes of the world and Neo-Liberal Democrats like the Clintons of the world. Instead, what we’ve now got is poor and middle-class blacks and whites being race-baited and racially polarized into opposite ends of the political spectrum, with the result that nothing of value can get done, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank. My point is that you and other race-baiters like you may think you’re helping the African-American cause, but you’re actually hurting it. Race is a cancer that’s taking over America, and we need to stop it before it metastasizes completely out of control and leaves the patient on life-support.