Black and Latino students did worse in schools with ‘diversity officers’: study | Hacker News Reader

Black and Latino students did worse in schools with ‘diversity officers’: study

nypost.com

50 pointsBostonian28 comments

As an actual Native American, I can tell you that one of my first actions after arriving to college was to change my advisor away from the assigned 'Indigenous-focused' advisor to one that was in my major.

I'm sure the Indig advisor was nice and well-meaning but I had things to do and an advisor from my major knew how to get me there.

Is there a good way to measure the efficacy of diversity initiatives?

IMO it seems that if there was a good data driven way to measure performance, it would allow adjustments to optimize for positive outcomes. As it stands, it feels like the majority of diversity initiatives are evaluated subjectively instead, so diversity officers effectively act as a political role more than serving the intended purpose.

This NY Post article definitely has a bias they are promoting, and the Heritage Foundation (conservative 'think tank') which ran the study certainly does as well. However, I hope more similar studies are performed - quantifying the effects of diversity initiatives is crucial to evaluating which are productive and which are counterproductive. There is likely a bell curve of outcomes, and we don't know which initiatives fall where.

> diversity officers effectively act as a political role more than serving the intended purpose.

I would argue the intended purpose _is_ political. Paying teacher more, providing free meals, etc would improve outcomes. Hiring someone who's job is to "officer" to kids of only certain skin colors is just political.

> so diversity officers effectively act as a political role more than serving the intended purpose

Yes.

Is this a case of soft bigotry of low expectations alluded to by GWB? I don't follow this issue particularly, but at first glance like things like the No Child Left Behind initiative end up simply lowering expectations of lagging students instead of raising achievement, which admittedly seems to be a much more difficult problem to solve.

Stop making laws based on races and set welfare politics based on income.

Then the retarded excuses from judges appealing for "affluenza" will flee away and then Americans will be able to understand for once that there isn't a race issue in the US, but an economical one.

The race divides are just distractions for the "peasantry" from the obvious struggles.

It helps to remember that every time you see a giant multinational corporation promoting diversity that they are talking about other rich people who think just like they do and are working to protect the status quo, but who have a few cosmetic differences that magically insulate their oligarchic activities from public critique.

The poor and working class are already quite diverse.

Race isn't a distraction, especially from economic issues. When you look through US history you don't see laws and regulations passed against people that cite income level, but we see them cite race. When blacks were prevented from voting or serving on a jury, no one considered their economic status. When housing covenants were created that expressly forbade selling to blacks, no carve outs were made for blacks of a certain income level.

> When blacks were prevented from voting or serving on a jury, no one considered their economic status. When housing covenants were created that expressly forbade selling to blacks, no carve outs were made for blacks of a certain income level.

Wouldn't you consider those laws a mistake? Wouldn't you want the law to be blind to race, considering the potential evil you've outlined?

I don't understand this reasoning. "Black people used to have their own set of laws, and that was bad, so now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people".

The impact of generations of de jure racism didn't simply disappear when the laws were overturned. My parents were already in school when the schools were first forced to integrate. Some of their cousins lived under segregation in the South and did not have access to even secondary education, let alone higher ed. On top of that, there are laws that persisted beyond segregation and even to the present day that are highly discriminatory in their impact, even if they are not in their literal content.

>Wouldn't you consider those laws a mistake?

>I don't understand this reasoning...now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people

Yes, it was a mistake, with grave intergenerational consequences. The idea behind new targeted laws is to make some effort to acknowledge and remedy the damage done.

I think you may not fully appreciate the massive, compounded, multi-trillion dollar impacts of this legacy, in conjunction with the profound trauma of psychic and physical violence inflicted over generations.

Because it's hard to imagine someone fully internalizing that, then effectively declaring, "can't we just say 'our bad', call it even, and move on?"

My understanding is that people with resources tend to acquire more resources, which means people who were excluded are as a demographic already set behind with little opportunity to catch up. In order to correct the bias alternate channels need to be made. (That’s the logic anyways. I haven’t seen any evidence the result is as expected…)

>...Black people used to have their own set of laws, and that was bad, so now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people

If you're arguing that Jim Crow laws are equivalent to diversity officers in schools in effect, I'm not really sure what to tell you.

Attacking drivers of racial division and discrimination has produced very many concrete improvements. Equal housing laws, anti-discrimination laws, anti-segregation laws have all been shown to do good. I think the track record for "positive equity" efforts is much more spotty. If we look at US minority populations whose measurable social position has improved greatly from their historical origins and matched or exceeded the white populace as a whole, how many of their success stories involved this type of heavy-handed brotherly-love enforcement? Irish people, Italian people, Jewish people, Asian people. I don't think the unending reminder of our differences ultimately contributes to social equity.

Citing ethnic groups that eventually become "white" and model minority groups is a whole thread unto itself, there is a reason your list doesn't include Native Americans, African-Americans and Hispanics. Race-blindness always serves to hide the hierarchy as it currently stands, as society is never blind to marginalized groups.

Most observers predict that Hispanics are on track to become the next "white" minority, followed by other groups. The whole point is that "the hierarchy as it currently stands" is not immutable, in fact it can shift rather quickly.

Who is predicting that? Hispanics have been here since Manifest Destiny ran into them way back when. Yet they haven't assimilated like other groups sourced from Europe, or ones that remain at non-threatening numbers.

The only time I ever here someone talk about a non-European sourced group ever becoming "white" is in the context of the conservative demographic threat on the horizon.

> Hispanics have been here since Manifest Destiny ran into them way back when. Yet they haven't assimilated like other groups sourced from Europe, or ones that remain at non-threatening numbers.

Hispanics assimilate quite rapidly. 50% of second generation hispanics consider themselves "white". The issue is the flood of new hispanics is sufficiently large so as to hide the corresponding flood of assimilation. Florida turned red on the back of hispanic voters.

Considering yourself one thing has nothing to do with how society views you. You can think you are as white as you'd like, it's not going to help when you are a 5'66'' man who grew up in an Indian and Mixtec speaking household. As for Florida, Fl is red because of the presence of Cubans who lost everything during the revolution and were whiter, and because of snowbirds retiring there.

> Considering yourself one thing has nothing to do with how society views you.

Being hispanic in the US has long been considered an ethnicity rather than a race. So yes, it is all about how you view yourself. And you cannot view yourself one way if the majority of your peers views you differently. It's just a myth to think that tens of millions of descendants of hispanics who view themselves as white are viewed as non-white by the society at large.

> Fl is red because of the presence of Cubans who lost everything during the revolution and were whiter

This is racist nonsense. The Cuban revolution happened in the 50s, and that's when the expats fled - only a minority of which were "wealthy". There has not been a rush of wealthy Cuban expats into Florida during the last few election cycles. What has happened is the decedents of those people are second and third generation now, which is exactly the phenomenon I was describing.

So when looking a how the hispanic population as a whole breaks blue, we can't cite the Cuban-American genesis story as why they vote Red?

So my claims that a portion of the descendants of hispanics view themselves as white - and therefore are white - and this portion increases with each generation, is not incompatible with the view that those who still view themselves as hispanics break more blue. In fact, it has nothing to do with testing this hypothesis.

Moreover, if you insist on trying to reduce the politics of Miami to Cuban Americans, and the politics of Florida to Miami, then you are going to be missing the big picture.

Walt Disney himself had Hispanic origins.

So?

The solution to discrimination based on race is certainly not to discriminate based on race.

Why do you think more racism is the solution?

>Americans will be able to understand for once that there isn't a race issue in the US, but an economical one.

Incorrect: there has been an inextricable link between race and economics in America by design, virtually since its inception. From slavery to Jim Crow to stolen land to redlining to mass incarceration and so on. The economic legacy from that history doesn't just evaporate and, in any case, redlining and other systems of disenfranchisement still exist.

>race divides are just distractions for the "peasantry"

Somewhat correct. It is true that race has been the basis on which less-well off members of the majority population have been convinced to accept their own economic disenfrachisement in exchange for some illusory sense of superiority and modest preferential treatment. They were sold the idea that economic empowerment is not what they should desire, but separation from and dominion over those who are "inferior".

So, for poor and working class members of the majority, it's a distraction. For minorities on the receiving end, it's reality.

Is there an article that's not quite so snarky and obviously biased?

The source study is from the heritage foundation - a fairly infamous conservative think tank. I think most outlets that pick up this study are going to have a similar bias.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

Not at the NY Post.

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