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Comment by manv1 | Hacker News Reader

Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class. Instead of using race as a factor, they can just use family income as a factor.

Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says. If so technically you're not supposed to use it, because the 14th amendment (which is what AA is based on) mandates "equal protection." Reverse discrimination isn't equal protection.

That said, racial politics in the US are all weird. First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

As a POC, I'm always amazed at how well advocates manipulate everyone to get what they want. Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. It's pathetic.

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Targeting poverty/income as oppose to race seems like such a no brainer to me. It still solves the same problem, except that it wouldn’t ever discriminate and if there was equal equity in poverty you’d expect equal equity in targeting it.

You know theres a shit ton of poor white people right? Its like people dont know that or something.

The DEI org at my company sent a mail out a few months ago saying how much the wage gap was between blacks and whites are, which is funny given that now Asian women have average higher wage than white men

The average wage gap is driven by billionaires. Poor blacks and whites are all....poor. And theres no need to measure the tallest midget even if theres a slight difference after you net out the .1% who drag up the averages for whites.

That’s not how medians work

Im well aware of how medians work (1 type of average). The gaps are often calculated by the mean.

Specifically a lot more poor white people than spots available in these schools. Asians are a “problem” taking up too many spots and are doing this from a position of only being 6% of the United States. Whites make up 57% of the United States.

This means you can easily fill these schools 100% with white students if you use only income as the proxy.

I personally believe the only fair course of action is admission by merit and then attack anyone racial disparities seem in each years admission at a different place in the pipeline.

I see some practical challenges in that for university admissions. What measures of poverty and income would you use and of whom? The high schoolers themselves will all look similar (as could be arranged at least). Many could arrange their income to look how would be most advantageous in a specific admissions year.

What’s wrong with using measures of merit of the applicant? GPA, standardized tests, application including essays, letters of recommendation, etc. The desire to find ways to improve upon direct measures and the hubris to believe placing these thumbs on the scales will make things globally better is somewhere between puzzling and mystifying to me.

The issue with using measurement X is that it quickly gets gamed.

Having a freshman class filled with people who’s parents wanted their kids to get into a good school isn’t the goal. Standardized tests for example are surprisingly gamble especially when you consider things like bribery.

Elite collages for example want their student body to look a specific way. One slice for ultra wealthy, one slice for foreigners, another slice for XYZ.

Low income and (to an extent) wealth are also gameable. Especially if you're well off and privileged.

> Having a freshman class filled with people who’s parents wanted their kids to get into a good school isn’t the goal.

Interesting - what is the goal according to you ?

> The issue with using measurement X is that it quickly gets gamed.

Goodhart’s Law[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

What exactly is meritorious (adjective: deserving reward or praise) about any of that?

Are you asking what is meritorious about GPA, standardized test scores, or an essay they wrote? Or something else?

Yep, those things. Are kids like trained animals, we praise and reward them when they do tricks for us?

If admissions to an elite or selective university is a reward, then yes, we do (and IMO should) reward them for strong performance in terms of GPA, SAT, or admissions essays.

More broadly, I absolutely praise and reward my kids when they do things that I believe are worthy of such feedback. Sometimes that's for achievement; sometimes that's for effort. It's part of the feedback process inherent in raising children; if you have a different approach that you prefer for your children, I don't have any objections to you using your approach.

That’s a great analogy, and also summarizes why it’s so problematic to make race a factor for college admissions. It makes minority kids engage in performative diversity in order to appeal to mostly white college admissions officers.

What would you call your job and your salary if not reward for tricks you do for others?

Since someone is paying me, presumably someone finds my output useful.

Does anyone think another book report on Anne of Green Gables is useful?

When I was doing alumni interviews I reserved the top rating exclusively for applicants that had ever had a real job. Not three weeks allegedly building houses in Central America, not an internship for well connected teens, only things like flipping burgers. That’s meritorious.

Are you rewarding them for the five-millionth book report on Anne of Green Gables? Or are you rewarding them for the learning process they went through that (almost incidentally) resulted in five-millionth book report on AoGG?

We already measure income for Pell grants, etc.

Race is massively harder and more biased. You’re black = assumed excess difficulty in life? What about white but just came from a refugee camp? What if your family has been poor for many generations?

There were reasons to say a black person’s life at $50k/y income is harder than a white person’s, and the same with boys vs girls, but things have changed quite a bit. Specifically society has mixed a lot more, immigration and interracial children have significantly changed the landscape, to say nothing of the fact that girls outnumber boys in college!

A family of 4 making $100K in Des Moines isn’t the same as a family of 4 making $100K in NYC either. Maybe two families are making the same, but one has their housing paid for.

I think the hurdle should be high for including adjustments to the applicant’s demonstrated ability, and looking at a year or two of tax returns isn’t going to give you a reliable picture. I have a deferred compensation system available (and I’m just a schmoe employee). If it was critical to their application, I could make those two years of tax returns look however I needed.

It's important to note that universities have been throwing money at using these proxies but still fall far short.

California's constitution banned affirmative action in the 90s and huge, well-endowed facilities like Berkeley have been unable to remedy their plummeting minority enrollment: https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/end-of-affirmative-acti...

Having spoken to some folks at (admittedly smaller) universities that work with such problems, substitute methods like income and zipcode are simply not as effective – not by a long shot.

Using something like census block as a proxy for social class also can be gamed. I live in San Francisco where there is a confusing and frustrating school lottery that gives preference based on neighborhood of residence in an effort to help lower income families.

Some wealthy friends we met at the playground moved to a (snazzy new) condo at the corner of a low-income census block for a year or two so they could get their kid an advantage in the SF kindergarten lottery, successfully getting them into their first-choice school on the other side of town. Then after the kid was enrolled for a few months, they moved to the (higher-income) neighborhood where the school is located.

Being nominally in a census block with slightly higher school lottery priority is a well-understood perk of some of these fancy new condo buildings, and may even drive some amount of gentrification.

(That doesn’t necessarily mean that advantaging people from lower income neighborhoods in school choice isn’t helpful, but it’s pretty hard to set up systems that actually measure what they’re intending to measure.)

It sure seems like a no brainer. The fact that colleges don't use it tells me that it wouldn't "solve the same problem" otherwise they would do it. They know the details and can see how it would work out.

I'd guess it would help lots of low-income Asian students. There are so many of them with pretty good test scores and grades. They might end up swamping the affirmative action beneficiaries under a socioeconomic program. That would be good for some types of equity but it wouldn't "solve the same problem" as affirmative action.

“Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip”

It’s more that they are terrified to talk about it because they risk being fired from their job and losing everything for talking about it. And they’re also not allowed to talk about how they are not allowed to talk about it. So this is the way it comes out.

Yup, keep your head down. Accept everything you're told even if you agree with it or not. There is nothing to be gained by asking questions.

This frightens me because it sounds like the setup for a preference cascade, where everybody realizes that they aren't alone, that everybody else thinks as they do. Suddenly the familiar order inverts almost overnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification#Gener...

To some extent, you see the real preferences when it comes to single-issue referendums (since the vote is secret, and there are no secondary "tactical voting" considerations there that might skew the preference). Some examples:

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

This is a valuable upside to referendums I hadn't considered before, thank you.

I am a white person in San Francisco and I do experience a lot of casual racism from POC. Just things like “there are too many white people here”, “that’s white washed”, etc as well as mild harassment on public transit.

I am often the only white person in any group, so comments like these among acquaintances get tiring, and I have nobody to talk about it with, partly because, according to a lot of these people, I am privileged despite me growing up in a far poorer neighborhood and single mother household.

While you are not wrong at all, neither is OP:

In many cases, the cowardice is served with a side of genuinely internalized guilt.

Its served with a healthy portion of irrationality.

Who are liberal white people afraid of? What group has power and what is their game?

They themselves. Some liberal whites are at the sebior level will exact the whip to get them in same group thinking...pretty much like Dems that always act in unisons as compare to Rep for decades.

Lawyers and HR people

> First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

I don’t follow your first assertion. Pretty sure that an “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” aka the original Virginia slave codes first introduced “race” by way of limiting length and terms of indentured servitude for “white Christian” indentured servants. Under these terms, the acts then categorized “servants important and brought… who were not Christians in their native land” as slaves unless they converted to Christianity.

If that’s not explicit enough, the acts pretty distinctly name conditions for “negroes”, “Jews”, “Moors”, “mulattoes”, “Mahometans” and “Christian whites”.

Technically you are right that there was no such thing as race in American politics. But it was literally created by elites to divide working class former indentured servants, natives and Black freedman, ostensibly in response to Bacon’s rebellion where these groups found their common enemy in elites. So really it’s not that weird that things are as they are today in our political system.

I think the problem is that advocates do not believe that race is a just proxy for socioeconomic status. There also seems to be a common belief now that justice for past wrongs means equity of outcome, not only equality of opportunity.

I'm not going to try to defend or argue against these beliefs, but I think a big difficulty in these discussions is that people aren't even understanding each other's arguments and worldviews. Of course, looking at and staying focused on actual data and research would be nice, but frankly that's not easy because social science data tends to be messy and social science research is extremely difficult to do correctly. You also have to be able to at least define and agree on operational goals/outcomes, which might be a challenge in and of itself.

“ Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class.”

This doesn’t seem to be a case in the top universities, which usually fulfill their diversity requirements by pulling from the elite class.

There is very little class diversity in our institutions and that is ripping the country apart.

I mostly agree, but:

>Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. It's pathetic.

More than anything, I wish people could speak/write about social/political issues without the spittle directed at whatever the highest level group is that their "enemy" group is a subset of (liberal, conservative, black, white, men, women, etc).

I think the law should treat people in a race blind manner. But race is also a component and proxy for culture and economic and social position. It’s fair game (and important) to talk about white liberals. What they believe, what their motivations are, where their interests lie, etc.

My understanding is that income based affirmative action would actually have little effect on racial demographics. Hence why this isn't really discussed by these top colleges.

In other words, top colleges would just be full of poor whites and asians (instead of middle-to-upper class whites and asians, without affirmative action).

This is somewhat confused. The equal protection clause limits what state governments can do. There’s a doctrine interpreting it called suspect classifications, and race is the most important of these. (Gender is quasi-suspect.)

There’s also a series of federal and state civil rights laws that regulate the private sector. These laws create protected classes, of which race is one.

There is some confusion about the definition of "affirmative action". The original definition from Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 requires that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".

What the supreme court is poised to do would in a sense reaffirm the original principle of affirmative action.

> Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says.

It's listed explicitly in the Civil Rights act of 1964, except I don't think it mentions something that applies to this situation - the phrase "affirmative action" was created just to get around it. I guess this will be about whether it applies/should apply here in addition to the rest.

> As a POC, I'm always amazed at how well advocates manipulate everyone to get what they want. Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time.

I don’t think you’re giving liberal white people enough credit. They’re playing a smart game. If it wasn’t for conservative and moderate POC going along with them, white liberals would be a political minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...

They turn up the dial on racial conflict to keep that coalition together. Who put Joy Reid on MSNBC to call half the country racists every day?

White liberals use POC the same way they used “blue wall” Midwestern voters. They don’t care what any of those groups thinks—which becomes apparent whenever the dominant view within one of those groups contradicts white liberals, whether on social issues or even on affirmative action. They’re objects of white liberal benevolence.

> First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

Not only that, but the way that "Whiteness" is obsessively referenced in so-called "liberal" discourse as some kind of master oppressor status is outright disgusting and can only be fairly compared to the very worst kinds of Nazi propaganda. There are significant amounts of white people in the U.S. today whose ancestors were serfs kept in bondage, and this state of things persisted even longer historically than the enslavement of people of African descent in the U.S. and Caribbean.

That goes a bit too far in the other direction. Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage. That includes slaves brought to the US and the Caribbean; slavery was rampant in Africa as well.

> Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage.

True, but serfdom persisted in some Eurasian countries well into the 1860s. This makes it plausibly quite relevant to present times, in a way that other forms of bondage might not be.

My point is not that white people don't have oppression in recent memory, but more that everyone has oppression in recent memory. And if you dig back further and further, you just find heaps and heaps of more oppression, and it ends up impossibly messy to do an accounting of historic wrongs and try to right them in the present day (which doesn't even touch on the question of how giving privileges to people now somehow rights the wrongs done to their ancestors).

Why?

I wouldn't go quite that far. But it seems counterproductive to vilify a large group of people based on their skin color, because it's likely to cause significant resentment and backlash in the near to medium term.

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