Hacker News Reader

Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

Because they understand that many students are disadvantaged or advantaged based on race. Affirmative action is meant to counter that.

View on HN

What about measuring wealth and education quality instead of race? If I'm a rich black/latino I have more advantages than a poor Asian/White/Jew student.

By the way, I know it shouldn't matter but I'm latino (Dominican). Looks like nowadays you have to have an specific race to have an opinion.

It's not a single axis of (dis-)advantage. A wealthy black person in America has economic advantages over a poor white student, yes. But the black student will have disadvantages based on their skin color that a white student wouldn't have. There are a lot of people advocating for entirely replacing race-based affirmative action with economic/wealth-based weighting but they're not mutually exclusive.

I would argue that wealth is significantly more important than color of skin.

Yes race matters. But your social class and financial means matter far more in most casss.

Policies like these based on race are precisely why students are disadvantaged by race.

We must stop looking at arbitrary and superficial physical attributes to determine a person's character if we are to ever get past all of this racial nonsense.

Wouldn't parents income be a good proxy for a disadvantaged background for college education purposes?

This unfairly penalizes students whose parents recently came into money. Early education is important, and it is unfortunately often the case that parents who work hard to become successful financially don't have as much time and energy to put into their children. Such children may be disadvantaged during critical years and now have the additional challenge of being penalized for their parents now being wealthy.

So the parents could provide N years of tax records showing they recently got money.

That sounds pretty racist to me. Basically saying that any race they give the upper hand to is poor in their eyes.

There is clear discrimination in the world. If you were a black person in my southern state, where the schools were worse in minority (usually the same as poorer) areas, the treatment from the police is worse, when you go for a job in high school they won't hire you to be in a front facing job like a waiter because you are black, you would see it. So what do we do, ignore it, because some white guy gets their feelings hurt that we try to give these people help? We need to help them. If you argue we don't need to, then it just seems heartless, and probably you are in a position where this is invisible to you.

This is a really difficult problem, trying to help increase opportunity. We run into reverse racism of a kind, with today's "too many qualified Asians" (because they are good students) in Harvard problem where they are trying for a diverse student body, but what does diverse really mean? Before this there was similar descriptions of too many Jewish people at colleges (in the 1950s I have read). No one ever wanted more of my kind of person either (white guy, a single parent but middle class) in my whole career and life - yet I should also state most of my coworkers my whole life in tech have mostly been middle class white guys. My parents were not about to be able to donate a million bucks to Harvard so I could go, they didn't go there, and neither did I. If Harvard allowed the best prepared students to go there, then there would be more rich legacy white kids and more Asians.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com