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 these effects are well studied and I'm sure these institutions have plenty of sociologists that could help come up with some models that work at least as good as stereotyping based on skin color.
The idea that generalizing based on race is just easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do we tell racists that they shouldn't prejudge people based on race at the same time that people with good intentions do the same thing?
I think zip code though will likely be more satisfying to people. Although the conservative wing of the supreme court has already said that they don't like the top 10% rules for admission, so I suspect they'll also not be kind to zip code since the idea is similar in spirit.
Highly motivated parents would have a reason to move into neighborhoods that they previously would not have lived in.
There's also a fraud incentive since it's not super difficult to pretend to live in a different zip code. Plenty of politicians do it.
There’s a reason that banks have compliance departments that have to review any statistical models inputs and assumptions for implicit violations of the Fair Lending / Fair Housing acts.
Rolling it up from the other side by giving top college spots to kids who were disadvantaged in the first place never made sense to me.
So yea, the consensus is that edu, knowledge and exp make a difference
>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.
What we're dealing with now is the legacy of those decisions. They made sense in that context but the context has changed.
These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged on their college application than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
> These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
I agree -- but a college application isn't for an average black student or an average white student. Each application is for one individual student, who had an individual life experience. If we want to help students who struggled in poverty -- let's measure their individual poverty. Then we'll help everyone at exactly the correct rate, rather than on some generalized presumption.
They're still not really integrated. At all.
Do you think this is why black parents were mostly against forced busing?
Here is, for example, a NYT article from 1973, describing result of a Gallup poll:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/gallup-finds-few...
> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.
> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.
Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:
> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.
The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.
Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571629
> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]
People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/sunday/it-was-nev...
Sure, but if it was the slave themselves who preferred slavery to what your courts were forcing on them, one should really step back and ask oneself if he is doing the right thing.
> Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities.
And there is an ample evidence that it made their lives worse, that one could obtain by simply asking them how they feel about the policy. The fact is that you remain completely uninterested in what the people you claim to be helping actually want, and instead prefer to force your preferences on them because you believe it’s better for them and the society. You know who else claimed the same about their policy, and ignored the protests of people affected by it? The segregationists.
that people will stop using one variable for such a complex, full of entrophy processes?