Re:Affirmative action at US colleges has been banned
by rayiner on Thursday June 29, 2023 @12:42PM
(#36522943)
There was a logic to the idea of racial preferences as originally envisioned. Studies show that the income gaps between American descendants of slaves and indigenous Americans basically have been unchanged even after segregation and legal discrimination was ended. The reasoning goes that racial preferences are necessary to undo these disadvantages.
But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.
A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.
Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.
But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.
A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.
Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.