Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, affirmative action mandates diversity hires. I don't think affirmative action affects "sleeping their way to the top".
> Well, affirmative action mandates diversity hires. No, it doesn’t.
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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
341–350 of 888 posts
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main rationale is that it is complicated. :-) 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 white…
The solution is not to create ever more complicated adjustments but to make sure that all children get great education (and nutrition) from early childhood, even if they are disadvantaged at home. 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.
You are assuming that education makes a difference? And that someone (the government?) can provide that 'great education'?
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#343The narrative of meritocracy is so old and running out of fashion. Merit confers privilege and you can spend privilege in many things but the most important thing you can spend it on is investing in maintaining that privilege via less than mertitocratic means.
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.
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#344Class can be a big part of racism--often what appears to be racism is really more about class. There are many people who look down on anyone they perceive to be "low class", regardless of race, and who will accept people of other races if they perceive them to be "high class". In areas where the lower classes are over-represented by racial minorities, this can look like racism, when classism is much more the culprit.
I’m in the top 10% of income percentile. But I still got looked at suspiciously as a Black person living in a county that’s 3% Black and as recently as the late 80s was a famous “Sundown town”
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKQdPMeJjk)
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?
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#345The second order effects of affirmative action's repeal are going to be very entertaining. You can get a sneak peek by taking a look at the student body at a school like UT Austin where, by law, 75% of students must be in-state and automatically admitted according to class rank (GPA). https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/freshman-profile You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and…
> Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale 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…
Make it geographical or conscious of class, parental income and geography. That would go so much further in the goal of reducing inequality and increasing fairness than classifying people forcibly on something which we used to say wasn't a scientific classification, race.
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#346Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both. 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 rece…
There’s only ~5 income brackets so moving “more than two” is indeed mathematically challenging for anyone in the middle.
There are 7 us income tax brackets?
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#347There is an error in the opening paragraph of the article, while it's true Trump added another conservative to the Supreme Court, prior conservative courts have always upheld the legality of affirmative action; indeed, every iteration of the Supreme Court has been conservative since affirmative actions inception. One would question why affirmative action was legal and constitutional just a few years ago, and as far b…
> This sort of discrimination was wholly race based
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.
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#348Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both. 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 rece…
> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. 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.
So we go very quickly from calls for meritocracy to oligarchy.
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a STEM academic, I can say that I've never seen or heard of ongoing AA for men in any STEM program in any institution whose policies I'm acquainted with. So it seems to me to be misleading to claim, or at least hard to believe, that very many men in college have been beneficiaries of AA for men.
For technology focused universities, women usually have higher admission rates than men: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/can-your-gender-give...
Because there are many programs deliberately designed to benefit women - as in, their public stated goal as well as taking direct (as opposed to indirect, i.e requiring height or strength) steps to limit their benefits to women.
The same is true of many minorities.
Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Race is by definition self-reported, and is easily gamed, as recent high profile stories show. 1950s America everyone wanted to be white. 2020s America everyone wants to identify as something else. This should tell you how the incentives have inverted. Class is also easy to game and hard to define. And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3? How do you conclusively determi…
Educational attainment is pretty easy to judge. Parents almost certainly have linkedin profiles. Census data also asks for education attainment. Incomes and assets are also attainable via tax info. Sure, they can cheat on income taxes, but usually that's making $100M in assets look like $60M. Just based on address they can at least determine the value of your home. An applicant attending Deerfield Academy that report…
Both of your examples (linkedin profile & census response) are the very definition of self-reported. Once they become a measure that has negative consequences for your childs college admission, they will stop being as accurately self reported. Further - a single social network is not an objective measure.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%. It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.