American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
economist.com
economist.com
I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year.
My 17-year old is applying to universities to study CS for fall 2023. We live in a highly competitive school district. He's hardworking and studious, as reflected in his 4.0 GPA and perfect 1600 SAT score (thankfully, some schools like MIT have brought back the SAT.) He has always taken the hardest possible AP and college-level classes and has strong extracurriculars. In a normal world, his chances of getting into top-ranked CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) would be decent, but we're Indian-American and are considered over-represented on elite college campuses.
Our school counselor and other parents we've have spoken with have flat-out advised us to: Apply to more lower-tier schools. Amongst the elites, target "hard STEM" schools like MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, where he’s more likely to get a fair shot (Asians are 40+% of the incoming class at these places.) Forget the Ivies — the last thing they want is “another smart Indian male” (the counselor's words, not mine.) You see, that won’t help with “diversity.”
Also — we use a system called Collegevine to keep track of applications. Applicants can input their GPA, SAT scores, extracurriculars etc. to understand their acceptance rate at specific universities based on historical data. For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%. I am not making this up — you can test this yourself.
Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1587420720644214799
The post is this since he famously deletes all his Twitter posts:
If you are denying or justifying discrimination against Asian applicants for colleges or jobs, you know exactly how all the most oppressive racists of the past felt.
--
By the way did you ever consider having your child apply to schooling in other countries that are purely exam and test based and somehow produce the engineers that FAANG companies love to hire? The education in those countries are almost free compared to the US and they graduate with minimal or zero debt and get hired for very high salaries by FAANG companies. Just look at the number of foreigners at FAANG companies with undergraduate STEM degrees from the rest of the world. They often do a masters or PHD (for free usually with TA or RA responsibilities) to get acclimated to the US and its nuances which your child does not need.
Among other things, Harvard is accused of adding a "personality" metric to admissions, covering likeability and attractiveness, and consistently scoring Asians low on it, to cancel out less important things like GPA, AP credits and SAT scores. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/harvard-admissions-a...
[edit] and before anyone asks, no I’m not Canadian
Where IVY undergrad matters is if they plan to pursue a PHD. And even that is debatable.
The reality is that the most elite universities create kind of a petite noblesse (necessary for moving into the upper nobility) that is very appealing to the middle class. I think the context here is that each race wants to keep the prestigious aspect of these schools in place but have it benefit their own group. We would probably all benefit if we got rid of this bottleneck by creating more stellar universities so that four or five universities don't have a monopoly on cachet but no one is interested in doing that.
Define privileged. You came to the U.S. which means you had the means and impetus to do so. Doesn't that already put in the top 50th percentile of world population? 50 is wild speculation on my part and it could be higher or lower.
I'm almost positive you are more privileged than someone born into a modern indigenous South American or African community. But what does it even matter? "Privileged" is completely relative and irrelevant because anyone who makes it past about the age of 18 is in some sense fortunate.
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
No. You're son will have to overcome unfair and unfortunate circumstances just like you did. Hopefully he has been prepared to do so.
If it makes you feel better, public California colleges cannot employ affirmative action as documented by https://ballotpedia.org/Affirmative_action_in_California, so your son's chances in the UC system should be unaffected by race based quotas. Best of luck to your son on college admissions. Having recently gone through that myself, it's a hell of an undertaking.
No its not fair which is why its controversial. The real problem is that famous schools are too prestigious right now and there aren't enough of them. Perhaps over time the newer schools who accept all the smart, hardworking students will become recognized for having the best grads.
Asian immigrant class of US is probably the most inspiring story of the American Dream.
The brand is real though. Those top tier schools are gateways to power and money. I read through the law suit made against Harvard and other schools and it blames white people, not affirmative action in general. It compares the test scores of white people against Asians and argues that there should be fewer white people. The % of Harvard that is white is 33%. The % of the US is 57.5%. Whites are being shut out of the premier gateways to power in the US. I think AA based on race makes sense in some way because of what these schools mean in reality. It's not just about education.
The test score gap between Asians and whites is not even very broad. So on the one hand, I think all this focus on race is detrimental to life if we use it to judge the most elite people in the country. On the other hand, I think this lawsuit is just more squabbling between races to be the #1. This is a fight about prestige and power and not education, at least in my opinion.
Anyways affirmative action for mostly white people (“legacy admits”) already exists. Removing AA based on race may not result in great outcomes for the underrepresented minorities. Huge disparities exist that cannot be corrected at the university level in entirely; but AA gives the opportunity for URMs to enter these spaces at higher rates than they would at a so called “level” playing field (it is never is the problem).
It’s time to start considering that there is far more to life than what “elite” colleges will have people believe.
The different perspective you are referring to is groups versus individuals. to the degree that they differ, whatever is most fair for one will be less fair for the other. It is objectively true that a group preference will be unfair on an individual level to some people. For example, on an individual basis, legacy admits only benefit legacy applicants. Yet you're using this argument to support penalizing people who are not legacy applicants.
Thank you for coming to America and for raising your family here. We are collectively richer for it.
Every applicant needs stuff on their application besides academics as well, so try to stand out there. They look for unique talents. If they believe that someone is the best X at Y niche that the admissions team likes them they're getting in no matter what.
Also... these schools admit a number of Indian-American males every year. Your son does have a chance. Unfortunately the competition is higher for him due to these unfair rules.
Even if you disregard how crude the official government racial classifications are (black Americans have much more in common with white Americans than with black Africans, for example, and Pakistanis have much more in common with Afghanis than with the former have with Japanese or the latter have with Swedish, contrary to what the governments racial groupings specify), if you are interested in recognizing hardship and overcoming the obstacles, why not just ask about those directly? When you read the students essay about his jailed father and mother working three jobs, what more do you learn from the mere race checkbox?
I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity. They really are, indeed, trying to achieve a certain color balance among their students, and they really do not care a lot about the diversity that’s more than skin deep. This is really as simple as that, and it’s disgusting.
That's the exact case I made. The kid with the absentee father has worked hard, and deserves to be helped. But it's independent of race.
>little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him
I caught the condescending tone here. We live in a good, safe school district but nothing else has been laid out for him. He found all the APs, college courses, internships and applied on his own. The one thing he's not is an entitled, spoilt brat -- he's the exact opposite who takes nothing for granted and works very hard to make full use of his opportunities. It's sad that some people can't see the difference.
Indian-American father here as well.
You came to the US from India. You are probably upper caste. You almost certainly got a good quality education in India for cheap. Your parents probably had servants.
You are privileged.
End of story.
Also, you watered down the term "privilege" to such an extent that it has lost any practical meaning. I came to the US as it is the land of opportunity, and still believe that is the case. In my view, anyone born here, including black and brown people, has sort of won the lottery already. But they're so concerned with "fairness" that they miss taking advantage of the opportunities right in front of them.
Let me help put your concerns to rest.
If Harvard et al changed their admissions policies to race blind tomorrow, your son still would not get in.
How do I know this? You are talking about his prospects as an applicant in a way that does not reflect a successful applicant (“another smart Indian male” or otherwise).
I assure you that Harvard and Stanford reject approximately zero “strong admit” applicants. Your son, based on what you have stated here, is not a strong admit applicant.
1. In academics, has your son done anything impressive at a national or international level? Think Westinghouse award, international science fair, or something similar. If not, has he published any academic papers (co-author ok)?
2. In sports, is your son a recruited athlete? Is he a HS varsity athlete who is competitive enough to compete at the university level? If so, has he expressed interest to the school and in the application?
3. In arts, has your son won a spot in a regional or national arts group (like youth symphony), or has he won a regional, national, or international arts competition?
4. In leadership/community, has your son started a successful business or group that has accomplished something meaningful?
5. In terms of non-racial diversity, is your son in a state and school that is under-represented in elite schools? We know that this answer is “no”, and quite the contrary, his school is probably highly-represented, so the school has a ballpark quota (range, not an absolute number). This is probably why his counselors have a good idea where he is in the school pecking order for school references.
Check out this article:
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
Focus on #3. What is your son’s hook?
> but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%
Well, I am guessing that those numbers are correct, but I think that some of the story is being left out.
Some (many?) black or Hispanic students with your son’s profile will be actively courted by organizations that will give them the experience they need to stand out (their “hook”).
This may exist for Indian-Americans as well (I have no idea), but that wasn’t really reflected in anything you wrote.
Anyway, most if not all of the black and hispanic undergrads I’ve met at ivies have had a very compelling hook, typically in leadership or sports (iirc, 20% of Harvard’s entering class are varsity athletes, and maybe half of those are recruited, so sports being their “hook” is not rare).
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
He is being “penalized” for having too narrow of a focus. That focus may work in some elite schools that have an all or nothing admissions exam (like some schools in India, Japan, China, etc.), but that type of focus is too narrow for many elite US universities.
The Ivies plus Stanford could fill their classes many times over with students who are very comparable to your son in terms of grades and SAT scores. They are looking for something more (the hook).
If the guidance counselors at your son’s school didn’t share that with him or you early in his high school career, then that’s really on them. They should know better assuming that they knew he had ambitions for an elite school.
1) The ivy leagues (and many other colleges of the US) shifted from a purely meritocratic assessment to an "all rounder" vetting process of potential candidates simply to eliminate the "undesirables" (at that time, mostly jews).
> The first thing to understand is that everything we know about selective college admissions today is less than a century old. So if you go back to 1910 or 1920, the Ivy League schools were not particularly expensive. They were not particularly desirable, in that they didn't have five or 10 or 20 times as many applicants as there were spots. And they weren’t particularly rigorous about vetting students ... So how did we get from there to here today, when these schools are desirable, expensive, and have a very rigorous vetting process?
> The answer is that most of those measures came about as part of the effort to limit the percentage of Jews in the student body. The extensive college application of multiple pages came about because they added questions to figure out if an applicant was Jewish, including What’s your religion? What is your father’s occupation? What is your mother’s maiden name? Where were your parents born? At some schools, they asked you to attach a photograph. Some began to require an interview. And that was in part so they could try to suss out if you were Jewish or not.
(Source: America’s most prestigious universities became elite through policies designed to keep Jews out of them. - https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/632c8ea068f6... ).
> ... the Ivy League didn't really want them. Being first-generation students, these applicants didn't have rich alumni parents who would be likely to donate big bucks. Being from an ethnicity not associated with America's governing class, they didn't help the Ivy League with its biggest selling point — that going to college there provides an opportunity to rub shoulders with America's governing class. And they were seen as boring grinds who studied too hard and weren't much fun.
> The result was a change in admissions criteria to reward "leadership," and "well-rounded" candidates — a thin disguise for "WASPs" — and, following closely on, actual quotas for Jewish students, so that no matter how many applied, their numbers on campus would stay just about the same.
Source: Asians get the Ivy League's Jewish treatment: Column - https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/23/ivy-league...
Yeah, it looks like they are doing the same thing with the Asian-Americans today (who have a similar immigrant cultural values like the jewish immigrants of the early 20th century - strong family ties and cultural importance to getting a good education).
2) If you are rich and have money to bribe these colleges, the "minimum qualification" will be "adjusted" to accommodate you. (Source: How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school... ).
Our HS uses both CollegeVine and Naviance. FWIW, Naviance shows my kid's chances ~2% higher on average.
That does not mean it is not a thing.
Someone asked why he has to apply to elite STEM schools -- he will get a great education anywhere. That may be true, but he's one of those kids who love to be surrounded by people smarter than him and be inspired by them. It's weird but the harder the class, the more fun he seems to have. He wants to be challenged in college. He will thrive at Mudd.
The problem with your statement is that affirmative actions is not based solely on race, so it appears that you are attempting to or have mistakenly fallen into perpetuating an offensive myth that the main beneficiaries of it are Black/Hispanic.
The group that has benefited the most from affirmative action are White/Non-Hispanic women.
White Women and Affirmative Action https://www.racismreview.com/blog/2014/03/11/white-women-aff...
White women benefit most from affirmative action https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-...
> My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars...
That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India and were able to take advantage of the opportunity. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.
As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
The context of why affirmative action was created, should not be skipped over, as if it applies simply to one person's situation and benefit. That you don't need something, is great for your situation, but that doesn't mean that's true for other ethnic groups and their situations.
"Affirmative action laws are policies instituted by the government to help level the playing field for those historically disadvantaged due to factors such as race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These laws typically pertain to equal opportunities in employment, education, and business."
What is Affirmative Action and Why Was it Created? https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/what-is-affirmative-action...
> For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances...
That's gaming the system, for personal benefits, and contrary to the purposes for which affirmative action was created. That would be like a guy saying that if he writes down he's a different gender, he can now cheat his way into getting something he should not (by pretending to be female). If anything, you should arguably be against people falsifying documents or trying to present themselves as something they are not.
And not one of those things is in the least bit his fault or responsibility, least of all the fault or responsibility of his son or many other kids in the same situation. It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others. The idea is in fact little better than the implicit punishment-through-bias accorded to other minorities because they or their ancestors were at one time considered inferior. A society can alleviate past wrongs without creating new ones of a similar if softer flavor against yet other collectively defined groups.
>As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place? Another idiotic and ugly idea: that a country makes itself better and then is right to foist part of the cost onto people who later come to it specifically because it's supposedly become a better and more just place, as if they'd had a part in its previous wrongs.
That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.
It should have been abundantly clear to anyone that I mentioned CollegeVine to show how the system works, not that we intend to apply as another race. Sheesh.
Sorry, this is textbook bigotry to me, and I am dismayed by the fact that this way of thinking infested the American academia and half of its political system.
As a young guy in the 1990s, I knew a few old bigoted Polish Catholics who disliked the Jews because they "killed Christ". Being naive, I was thinking back then that this kind of heritable guilt was on its way out. Nope, I was wrong. The ideology that you describe is arguably even more nonsensical, classifying totally unrelated ethnic groups as "white-adjacent" and assigning them the same or even greater level of malus points.
The most absurd thing about your argument is that OPs ancestors probably lived under British colonial rule more recently than American blacks under their masters, and approximately at the same time when Jim Crow was rampant. And in 2022, white liberals treat them as undesirables once again, and once again for racist reasons; only the details have changed, but not the principle: Sorry, there is too much of your people on the campus already. Begone.
Why are you making it out like it isn't? This is quite literally THE subject. Why is his son being penalized for his skin color?
There is no logical stance for Affirmative Action as it currently stands without admitting that you are for racist policies.
Would you happily sacrifice your son's wellbeing for the Greater Good, or whatever some talking heads say that the Greater Good is?
In that case, think hard about yourself, because you just might be sliding into fanaticism, or that kind of suckership that keeps tyrants afloat and fills their armies with cannon fodder since time immemorial.
Politics is about people voting in their self interest. If you're Asian, that calculus is simple. Trump might be boorish and say mean things, but his side wants to maintain a system that has worked extraordinarily well for Asians. Poor Asian kids have more than double the income mobility of poor white kids. Vietnamese people came to Reagan’s america in poverty, and closed the gap within a generation. The numbers are irrefutable.
Sure, the other side will make an elaborate show of learning how to pronounce your name. But they want to create a system where your kids (and my kids) will be left holding the short end of the stick simply because they're "not the right kind of diversity." Just consider the phrase they love to use "BIPOC." Non-white people all lumped together, our distinctions erased, except for two groups listed as "first among equals." They are telling you who they are, believe them!
And don't think for a second it will stop at college admissions: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-affirmative-action-had.... In Kamala Harris’s America, Asians will be 7% of the engineers at Google and Facebook, instead of 40%. That’s “equity.”
* Black descendents of slaves vs African immigrants [1]
* Chinese Americans vs Hmong Americans (a higher poverty rate than Black Americans! [2])
* A Korean who grew up in Koreatown LA vs one who grew up in Utah
* A Boston Brahmin vs an impoverished White Virginian whose family members were targeted by eugenic boards
That said, Affirmative Action can reasonably make those from marginalized groups feel more welcome. In elementary school for example, I felt very out place among the largely affluent members of my accelerated math class. By contrast, I related much more to the mischievous truants who would later go on to be low-level criminals.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
[2] - https://tcf.org/content/commentary/misleading-data-policies-...
During the orientation process I had to speak with a young woman about grants and scholarships. She was showing me what was available pulling up a grant or scholarship, each one she selected was for women, people of color, or women of color. After seeing these for ten minutes in a row without one I could I apply for, I made the joke, there doesn't seem to be a lot here for white males. She said I can just apply and let them know I was a white male and I would get like we do for everything else. I ended the process there with a sour taste left in my mouth.
She was unaware of my background, growing up on an island in Alaska in housing built during WWII that was eventually condemned in our last year. Moving to rural NC for my last two years of high school, then spending time in the military, separating from Turkey literally months before the attempted coup.
She saw my race not the diversity I would bring from my experiences.
Why do you need a grant or scholarship?
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The destitution and most importantly shame that he experienced as a boy shaped him, both in the amazing way he was able to seize control of the Senate and defeat the racist reactionaries who mentored him, and in the negative way that he embraced and wielded unbridled power and corruption.
To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age.
Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is recent, overt, and systemic. It is impossible to deny the history of racism unless you are an idiot. The question is what, if anything, can be done about it that actually improves things. The answer is probably very little. Affirmative action is problematic and has some negative side effects, but it has probably been a net positive for society. It will also probably be struck down as it is now negatively and unfairly impacting another minority group.
You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.
If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.
Recently I have been thinking in this vein too... This "American dream" is such a repeated cliché that some may think it's just that: a cliché in the minds of even Americans. But my current hypothesis is that many (most) Americans actually believe it. To the point of being blind of the actual nature of this "meritocracy".
This blindness to the fact that individual agency is not really as powerful as the "dream" states basically reinforces the idea that certain hard to change property of an individual (ie. Race? Gender identity? Sexuality?) must be the core reason for lack of success/progress: the biggot believes not all people are what it takes to succeed, and the biggot's prey believe their core nature/mark is the main reason why others don't support their progress.
I certainly believe that there is no rigid social class in America and it's definitely possible to move between income brackets with relatively little social stigma. In the UK for example no matter how much money a working class person makes they will never become upper class. Never be welcomed into the top social circles etc., they didn't go to the right schools (pre-college) or dont have the right accent...
I'm not as blind to believe that parental wealth doesn't matter hugely. I also wonder if it might be more difficult to move income brackets in the USA due to the extremely high cost of education.
I'm interested to see that you consider it to have been net positive for society. What tangible benefits outweigh the obvious negatives?
Race is an unchangeable, decided at-birth deal. Class on the other hand changes based on how you succeed to that end. People do feel class as something that is not fixed, and can be changed.
In some way getting rid of Racism means changing other people, and changing class requires one to change one's own ways.
Basic human life conditions should really not be up to a game of "success" that by definition has few winners. In my opinion at least.
I am not from the USA. But did racism not arrive, with the first white colonials, along with class? Why is racial prejudice more recent than class prejudice?
Historically minorities were prevented from being capital owners and as that changed aristocrats appealed to skin color while also routinely sweeping the legs out from under poor whites as they still do today, after enraging them stupid shit like tan suits and public protests.
Thanks to inflation, moving one or two income brackets is closer to staying in the same place. $100-200k year in the 80s is equivalent to $600-700k now. If parents made $50-60k then and junior makes $150k, the number tripled but the buying power is worse.
I don’t really understand why we cling to the hallucinations of elders who, given their ages, when they were educated, are “behind us” when it comes to scientific knowledge and intuition, and are gripped by paranoia and anxieties from Cold War and the world at war in their prime years.
They operate on economic models from a period of heavy demand due to war. Afflicted by sunk cost fallacy, evolved the behavior to disposable consumerism.
The last 80 years of economic growth are entirely due to the rest of the world needing to rebuild and the US having functional infra. There’s no way it was sustainable, as the correctness of such activity is merely one generations memory, not some immutable law of reality.
Any sufficiently numerate person can intuit the game being played. Bigger number! Oo! But prices on the market have gradually been inflated to prevent new workers being able to afford real assets, and as a result of other nations catching up and making the same demands.
That overlooks the elephant in the room: land ownership.
This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action. Naturally, high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools. We ignore that difference as a policy matter. Top 10% is top 10%.
Maybe the Ivies will move to a similar system in the wake of the current SCOTUS case.
AFAICT, the ivies don't have a problem with filling their graduating class. I believe a place like Harvard even considering the top 10% of students would increase the applicant pool. I'm reciting these numbers from memory, but apparently the size of the incoming class at Harvard is roughly 2,000 students, but there are ~5,000 applicants that scored 95th percentile of the SAT. (Edit: This source [3] says there are 22,000 students who scored in the top 1% percentile; Harvard could likely admit every perfect scorer if it pleased).
While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile.
The real problem is the size of the undergrad class for these select elite schools have remained the same (The harvard class size of 1992 was 2,200[1] compared to 1,954 today[2]), while the US population has grown almost 30% in the same time frame. You have more and more qualifying students fighting for the same number of spots and an organization that is more than happy to split imaginary hairs to keep the class size the same.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-new-day-at-harvard/artic...
[2]https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/4/1/admissions-class...
[3] https://go.collegewise.com/how-many-people-get-a-perfect-sat...
> high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools.
The most cynical read of the Texas policy is that it is an end-around of the SCOTUS ruling that relies on continued, widespread school segregation in Texas.
If Texas schools were not segregated by race and wealth, this policy would not have the result of producing the diverse classes that the University of Texas system desires. The university system depends on the unfairness of the K-12 system to achieve its narrow set of policy goals.
That's a misunderstanding then because that's not affirmative action. Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.
It doesn't ensure you get all the best students. That's true. But that doesn't make it affirmative action.
This was a disaster for the students who were top at their high school, but nevertheless not prepared to go to a top tier university because their high school was not a college prep school. They either flunked out or changed to majors they could scrape by in. They would have been much better off going to a community college for a year or two to level up first.
Assuming they lose the case things will get interesting.
Name a "progressive" state that comes even close.
About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.
Running schools for profit is questionable on its own and I think it's tolerated because historically University/College education was seen as optional. We've moved away from that in a lot of the sectors that drive the economy these days though and the system hasn't been tweaked (regulated I suppose) appropriately.
I once took my team to lunch and the waitress asked would we be on one check or separate, I spoke up and said one, started reaching for my wallet and she still handed the check to the older looking White guy that I hired.
No matter how much money I have, there will always be assumptions about me. I have seen this a lot more when working for companies in the South than I do now when I travel to customer meetings now that I work for BigTech and I’m leading projects.
Thought experiment: if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
But, why do we need to use race as a proxy? Presuming something about someone based on their skin color is prejudice regardless of your intentions.
If people are disadvantaged, let's measure those disadvantages directly and adjust for those factors.
Controlling for income doesn't work well, because whites at the same income level tend to have much more wealth than blacks at the same income level. Controlling for wealth, blacks still tend to poorer access to resources (clean water, prenatal care, etc...).
It would be a great achievement if we could simply say that poor blacks were finally as well off as poor whites, but we're still quite a ways away from that.
That said, I don't think the country has the stomach to realistically try to fix that problem any longer.
>But, why do we need to use race as a proxy?
There are two possibilites:
1. They dont see the logical fallacy, perhaps because they are clouded by empathy.
2. They fully understand that they are discriminating by race and think its good.
Because historically race was used systemically to limit opportunities for people of color. The last school to be desegregated was in 1963. Think about that.
I love the economist. Their writing is so good, they are biased but know it, and acknowledge it. Biased, but not bigoted. nYet this article misses the point, IMO, or racial quotas in professional schools. They have the liberal individualistic bias, and have not noticed that one. It is their water (I am a liberal myself, but I have had that particular bias removed by my experiences.)
Here (Aotearoa) the point of quotas is not to allow some groups the same access to the privilege of the profession, but it is to help the consumers of professional services get what they need.
For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients. This is not a benefit to the individual professional, it is a benefit to the community.
There is a secondary benefit to the professions themselves. A cultural milieu helps bring new ideas forward.
Whether or not the system in the USA is fit for purpose or not, I do not know. But when deciding I hope the American judges think not, only, of benefit to the individuals but the wider effects on our communities.
And what was the society answer to racism? More racism but directed towards groups that were deemed "offenders". Somehow, some people decreed that thare is "bad" racism and that there is "good" racism. That there is "bad" discrimination and that there is "good" discrimination. This is obviously false and we should return to the situation where all people have equal rights.
Also, what the hell is this supposed to mean:
> For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients.
Most folks at Harvard law are going to go to corporate law firms, where most of the clients are rich white people. Are you suggesting that as a Bangladeshi I'm less helpful to my clients because I'm not from a similar community? Is a lawyer from a less affluent part of Appalachia less helpful?
I can at least understand the justification that quotas are needed to allow access for historically oppressed groups. But the "diversity" justification seems like straight up racism to me. Are we supposed to be the same or are we not?
No, not at all. In fact, this rationale was a trope for racist practices around the world. Japanese bath houses would refuse service to foreigners claiming doing so would drive away japanese customers. White employers in the US would refuse to hire Black staff reasoning that customers wouldn't respect them. I read Ben Carson's memoir (I do not endorse his views, as a disclaimer) and in it he details an episode where a white patient refused to be treated by a black physician. His boss told the patient that she'd get the same excellent quality of care that she'd get from any other physician and wouldn't supply an alternative to Carson. As a Latin person, I'd feel perfectly comfortable with a Latin person refusing service from a Black, Asian, white, Jewish, or doctor what whatever category you pick.
Also, as a member of a "marginalized" group I can say the Economist is spot on with the fact that class far more salient in real life than ethnic difference. There's plenty of Latin people that fit the image of a disadvantaged Latin immigrant, struggling to make ends meet. Certainly a greater proportion than whites, but there's plenty of us that aren't underprivileged compared to your average white person. The distinction between a poor Latin immigrant and an American born Latin tech worker like me is far, far greater than the difference between me and the average white tech worker and the poor Latin immigrant with, say, a poor Ukrainian refugee.
You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and Texas' demographics, respectively, Harvard's system was closer to the mark in terms of black and white representation. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Most interesting is UT's 40/60 M/F gender ratio. Remember: that 40% of males is almost certainly being boosted by the 25% of admits UT has any real control over. Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale. I think half the population suddenly realizing they were beneficiaries of affirmative action this whole time—and subsequently understanding the nuances of discrimination in this country—will ultimately be a good thing.
And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.
If we want to fix that then we need to help boys in elementary school, not dumbing down the admissions process.
Sometimes reality is exactly what society needs to confront.
I have the same view with censorship. I’d rather let the dummies embarrass themselves in public than hiding them in the shadows and pretend they wont all still believe that crap and never having the opportunity to have their ideas challenged.
Taping over problems often hides the root causes while doing nothing to deal with it.
I doubt that if they haven't figured out it's a nuanced thing by now that they will figure that out after the second order effects come into play.
Also, if/when the question comes up, there is a different standard for sex-based discrimination than race-based. The former is subject to intermediate scrutiny, whereas the latter is subject (in general) to strict scrutiny.
So it is plausible that the Court would determine that some sex-based discrimination is acceptable, and simultaneously determine that no race-based discrimination is acceptable.
Drop out rates for the disadvantaged can be high as well regardless of affirmative action getting them in. The difficulties are cultural and I agree that making this situation clearer is a net good.
Or change it so it is not race based. Instead make it geographical.
Say you want to admit 1000 students from the US. Partition the US into 1000 districts, with 1 student admitted per district.
Gerrymander the district boundaries to make sure that you get the racial demographics you want.
Have fun watching the Supreme Court try to explain why that is not OK but it is OK to gerrymander congressional districts to ensure Black people are underrepresented.
The media and political class continually manufactures the racial divide. We see this now with the culture war about crime narratives.
A Americans lack class consciousness in part because a plurality of Americans do not have the lived experience of the "working class". The decimation of the labor movement over the past 50 years didn't help either. And those who experience class divide the most, the very poor and homeless, are totally politically disenfranchised.
- post slavery, many formerly enslaved people had better skills than poor white people
- to prevent poor white people from joining forces with these formerly enslaved people as a large class of “the poor” vs. small class of “the wealthy” racial distinctions began to be used more frequently
- this had the effect of basically allowing the “poor white man” to side with “wealthy whites” (regardless of if something was in their best interests or not) because he could console himself with “I may be poor but at least I’m white” — even though the rich whites often advanced laws and regulations that were generally detrimental to the poor as a “class group”.
Is there any hard data on this or is it just heresay/opinion?
Maybe a ZA issue tho?
Your point is not a bad one. Race is not rigorously defined. And yet, there are large groups of people still suffering significant disadvantage along racial lines, for historic and ongoing reasons. It's not possible to address this in a race-blind way.
In practice, affirmative action policies work essentially on the honor system.
This, and the "blind" part of the title seem really jarring to me. Would it be less socially divisive to, e.g. make sure that the incoming class came from families were more representative of the income distribution overall? Or would we have lots of indignant stories about the student with a high GPA who believes they were passed over in favor of a less credentialed lower income student?
I don't think Americans are at all "blind" to class. It divides our neighborhoods, it's signaled in the clothes we wear and the cars we drive and the vacations we put on instagram. Class highly visible everywhere. But we're so extremely well trained that wealth and privilege always go together. The idea of a policy which says to the wealthy, "you can have at most this much of the pie" is very foreign. If people accept that idea when the pie is college admissions, what next? The top 1% can be responsible for at most 5% of the carbon emissions? The top 5% can use at most 10% of the water in drought states? The top 10% can capture at most 30% of economic growth? I think a majority of people at every income level would see this as deeply un-American.
Why is this a problem? Other schools exist which are accessible to people without wealth and connections.
The colleges can let in whoever they want or don't want. We don't need all of them to be an accurate representation of society at large. Plenty of other institutions in society are also not representative - churches, companies, sports teams - and that's just fine.
It's just literally not the school's problem. We've wasted many cycles and divided society by pretending like it is.
Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…
"Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests. The study found Canadians and landed immigrants with names such as "Jill Wilson" or "John Martin" are 40 per cent more likely to be offered an interview than someone with a name like "Sana Khan" or "Lei Li," given an identical resumé. Applicants with mixed names like "Vivian Zhang" had a 20 per cent better chance to land an interview than job-seekers with non-English names, but still less than the English-only names."
For US research for the second [2]: "Blacks were 63 percent more likely to be stopped even though, as a whole, they drive 16 percent less. Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95 percent more likely to be stopped. Blacks were 115 percent more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop (5.05 percent for blacks, 2.35 percent for whites). Contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers."
On HN discussions on racial issues, there is often at least one comment that asserts that people get equal treatment due to race, and any contrary reports are fabricated. My only request is for people to try to practice humility, and at least consider the idea that one's personal experience of life may not be shared by everyone else's (for the rationalist crowd, at least consider that statistical studies should have more weight than beliefs formed from one's personal experience, where n=1).
[1] https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_traffi...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/job-applican...
I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, I'm saying that in my experience the folks lashing out with racism who I grew up with had serious problems in their home lives that had nothing to do with race. I know every case is different, but anecdotally what I witnessed appeared to be either scapegoating, or learned behavior. Again, I'm only trying to explain what I saw, not excuse the behavior.
My point is that I don't think they actually hated other races (at least at first, I won't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who lives in their own echo chamber for years), because quite frankly their experience with the races they spoke poorly about was extremely limited (I grew up in the frigid north, where most locals are either white or Alaska Native - I don't know why that is, but it is).
When that behavior first started in early high school, I think the few of us who parted ways from that group kind of brushed it off for awhile because... we didn't know what to say, I guess? Folks who by all accounts appeared to be reasonable and entertaining people only a year ago were suddenly dropping racial slurs openly amongst their friend group - which I was peripherally a part of. All of the connections I had to that group either disassociated themselves with those folks like I did, or disappeared because of hard drug use.
And yet it seems it does in upper class enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan... It's an interesting and perhaps telling correlation: the college-educated, privileged elite who believe they are doing the right thing by zeroing in on race as the foundational problem of America.
How naive and perhaps blissful to to be so ignorant at how unjust the world is overall, there are so many perhaps urgent issues with suffering people, and we're worried whether companies with average salaries in the multi-hundred-thousand dollar range are diverse enough.
In a microcosm within a big country where the average savings and health and medical insecurity are very serious.
The focus on race, even if race is on a checklist of problems to resolve, borders on scandalous.
The scandal is the list of people whose lives are ruined because they're poor and either experience an absence of medical care or crippling debt. But it's a class issue and that topic is verboten, perhaps because it's non-existent to the groups mentioned in the first sentence above.
Looking at health inequity should be a priority over who is on the board room or what groups occupy what percentages of things. It would make for a more just society in a big way.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
Division over race, gender, sexual preferences and lots of invented "identities" brings out the worst in people.
We should concentrate on what people have in common, not in what they might have different.
Is there a path or actions that address class issues other than the standard "run for office" and "vote for people who will address class-related issues"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/nyregion/ranked-choice-la...
(Note that it doesn't matter whether they have a point or not. What matters is that now, either way, you'll have to talk about it whenever RCV comes up. There is similar contention around IRV and some other methods; basically anything that disrupts existing power arrangements.)
This was surprising to me.
"As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it's sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole".
[0] https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/theodore-w-allen-s-the-inve...
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You can see this across companies at a lower level (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/amazon-lab... and https://archive.ph/1khJw). Discussions about race will suck all the air out of the proverbial room, will sow division and create resentment. Regardless of political color, people will always have a tiny bit of resentment when it comes to stuff like affirmative action. So instead of being mad at their boss, they're going to be mad at their colleague (who's completely innocent in this) and slowly but surely start accepting right-wing narratives as truth. Holy crap, even more division, right? Nice.
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...
But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student?
- Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors.
- Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too?
- An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then?
Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice.
Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige.
And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all.
but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
The idea is to identify divisive topics and keep talking about them over and over and over until people are upset fighting each other, but more importantly, distracted from the fact they could at any moment revolt and reform everything.
In the same manner Africans are nationally oppressed by America. This was more evident in my parents time when they couldn't vote, use white bathrooms, drinking fountains, play major league baseball etc. During Robert's life as well. Some of those restrictions have been removed, but looking at statistics we see how Africans are kept out of these places. The Supreme Court generally lessened the overt oppression against Africans since the 1950s, it looks like they are headed back to the old days now.
I don't think Europeans can comprehend the schizophrenia of America's attitude towards those of African descent. Like here, their friends at the Economist (probably some 20 something factotum just out of university) carry this idea on. Of course painting America's national oppression of the Africans it kidnapped to here as just, the natural order of things etc.
It’s a devils advocate position of course.
Harvard will always be Harvard, but plenty of “lesser” colleges benefit from a famous alum/patron.
Steven Jobs did wonders for Reed College. Charlie Munger for UCLA. Oppenheimer for Berkeley. Etc.
“The solution to classism is to ignore racism! No don’t ask why I feel that way or how I got to that conclusion!”
good interview with him (and i'd say he explains things much better than the article imo)
https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-jr-the-perils-of-race-re...
Privileged classes have become very good at keeping the privilege: they have built a large moat (wall?) around them at the top floor of the social ladder using the bricks of the ladder itself. It's so hard to climb the ladder and so hard for those at the top to fall.
1) A Bangladeshi immigrant whose parents entered the US as economic refugees
2) A Uyghur immigrant whose parents entered the US as political refugees
3) A rust-belt white whose family and community was ravaged by the opioid crisis
3) A descendent of black slaves whose parents were economy oppressed by Jim Crow and Redlining
How many "credits" do you give to someone who experienced food insecurity? What about the death of a family member? Do they get bonus points if it was a violent death? If so how much? The more you dig into these subjective measurements, the less it measures the candidate and the more you end up measuring the measurer.
Society cannot find right answer to this kind of question intellectually, instead it can only be determined politically. If we go down this path, the the answer we get will be a reflection who the winning political faction is, and what their prejudices are. Today, it is the hyper race-conscious left against Asian Americans. Yesterday, it was white elites against Jews. Tomorrow, who knows?
I agree that GPAs, SATs, and economic hardship are imperfect measures of merit. But what's important is that they are systems that can be interrogated for their inner workings. You can arrive at a decent understanding of how and what is being measured. However, the act of "privilege measurement" is so muddy as to be an enormous invitation for prejudice to seep in.
And liberalism putting identity politics first divides the electorate and makes it so we can't make any progress on overwhelmingly popular economic policies (e.g. universal health care, college and child care), which is by-design. And the Democrats will continue to take money from corporate interests and happily fail to deliver on any really big policies which would move the needle for the bulk of Americans. Middle and upper class liberals will continue to scream about racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic people--who will continue to be those things and vote Republican and nothing will get done.
But The Economist packaging up the end of Affirmative Action with a message about how maybe that is a good thing because we might restructure it around class (we won't) is a bit disingenuous.
In a multi-racial society like the U.S, people are less likely to believe that because of racism. This is why libertarians and racists are often strange bedfellows because they oppose communism together, but for completely different reasons. They would probably be sworn enemies in a racially homogenous society.
So you're correct, for certain definitions of "working class," but I find attempts to dismiss anti-racism (and increasingly LGBT ) progressive efforts as being merely a distraction from class struggle to be tone-deaf at best, and counterproductive at worst.
Intersectionality is a thing. Race shapes class - especially in the United States where class was literally built around racial caste and identity - and class shapes race. We can have praxis along more than one dimension.
AA (and also Critical Race Theory) argue that race/racism are the defining structural concept that order economic and social relationships. Marxism argues that it is by wealth or class.
For a fun conspiracy theory, could neoliberalism be pushing this CRT view because it divides and conquers the lower classes by race?
One would question why affirmative action was legal and constitutional just a few years ago, and as far back as the 1980's, but illegal now.
As for the content of the article, discrimination in the US against blacks, historically and presently, is race based, not class based. This is common sense, perceptualy one only sees someones outer features, not their bank balance or other unknowable signs of class.
At one point blacks (even world famous American blacks) couldn't vote, couldn't attend the commons, couldn't purchase homes in certain affluent neighborhoods, and couldn't be part of certain organizations (and still can't till this day). Curiously, blacks were never compensated for this injury perpetuated against them by their own government.
This sort of discrimination was wholly race based, your income or your social standing was irrelevant. This is why people focus on race and not the red herring that is class.
You said it right. “Was”, not “is”. In 2022 we need to focus on what’s affecting our society the most, which is income and wealth, not race. Of course racism exits today, but it’s playing a far smaller structural role than the amount of money a person and their family has.
https://www.amazon.com/Times-Project-Racialist-Falsification...
Steve Bannon actually explains this quite well in a PBS Frontline interview
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
It’s infuriating to constantly have the Economist pushing the idea “the country is racist” or “so and so is racist” for many years now. Only to point out what most people know - a poor person in west Virginia is likely to be white, and have more in common with a poor black person from DC than a wealthy white person from DC.
Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
It’s all of our fault. If we didn’t click on it, they would stop publishing it.
There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy.
How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess ...
I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it.
I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.
"American Media is Focused On Everything But What They Should Be (And Are Paid Well For It)"
This is yet another example of how many of the elites live in a bubble. Well educated, yet oh so ignorant.
Fairly simple thing... happens to work.
You know, anything different, that's what they're gonna talk about: race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class... keep on showing up at those jobs.
george carlin, 1992, “jammin’ in new york”
The most pathetic thing about the American discourse about Affirmative Action is that everyone has an opinion on what the admissions standards SHOULD be from their perspective on how society should operate.
Some think admissions should be all about merit.
Some think that since the first 18 years of the student's live has been unfair and racist, 4 yrs of college should somehow attempt to rectify that.
Nobody realizes that the colleges don't give a shit about any of that. Admissions are there to maximize the prestige of the college. That's it. To be damned with diversity and society.
Furthermore, nobody seems to recognize that Affirmative Action doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. College admissions are not really about merit. Affirmative actions is not able to undo the racism and economic equities of this country. It's not able to make black and brown parents push education on their kids the same way that Asian parents do. By the time the student is 18 it's too late - society has done its worst. And so despite the fact that the US has had affirmative action for many many years, social mobility here is worse than France, Italy, Sweden, and Britain. (see https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...)
I’m not a fan of the term “positive discrimination” at all. It tries to hide the fact that the “positive” effect to one group is necessarily at the expense of another. Whether it’s positive or negative just depends on which group we’re talking about.
And you can talk about statistics and averages and whatnot all day, but once you start applying averages to individuals – which is essentially what "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" amounts to – you're always going to be wrong in a very substantial number of cases.
In the US rich black people, hispanics, and asians are just like rich white people...but with different decor.
Actually I prefer rich white people, because they do care about the aesthetics of the public arena. Public service etc isn't just lip service for many of them. The whole of Western Europe and the wealthy enclaves (and high-end suburbs) of America are a testament to that aesthetic. That ideal, as shown by Currier & Ives and Rockwell, are the world as it should be.
In Asia and Africa the rich are literally walled in, probably because they're always aware of the threat of violence towards them.
America has its own castes.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...
It's also focused on class. Its been constantly attacking people who think that class matters since the 20s, and is rabidly anti- any sort of forced sharing, or restrictions on spending as literal sedition.
The economist also hates the poor, but it's willing to care about the poor for a single article if it helps them attack the blacks.