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"In 1951...MIT was not exactly an intellectual backwater, but it was nothing like what it is today...it also had a less exclusionary tradition than Harvard or even Princeton. By the 1950's, perhaps 40 percent of the mathematics faculty and students at MIT were Jewish. Bright youngsters from New York City public schools, effectively barred even then from attending Princeton as undergraduates, went there. Princeton was 'out of the question for a Jew,' recalls Joseph Kohn, who enrolled as a freshman at MIT in 1950. 'At Brooklyn Tech the greatest thing in the world was sending a student to MIT.'"

HAHA. That was only 50 years ago. So, the point isn't to shed identity and align yourself with the Hegemon. It's to topple that beast over, put yourself on top--and popular values re-align soon after. Like in the Believer: "Maybe we're all Jews now". And put the Asians there too, of course. At Dart I forgot what it felt like to be in a crystalline meritocracy, how correct it felt. I had long stopped believing in god but in the not too distant past I believed unequivocally (transcendently!) that a 95 was always vastly better than a 90. That was before I had the precolonial bullshit architecture of the sons of old Dartmouth shoved in my face all day, before I could ever think that achievement could be a myth, that what was really on top of the mountain I was climbing wasn't the smartest or the best, but a bunch of cretin mediocrities in pink polo shirts, and only because their daddies' daddies had bigger guns and no conscience. What I mean is I really do look forward to a time where J&As rule the world...