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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

AIUI, it’s even worse, as the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are well off members of the minority group (e.g. the kids of doctors and dentists) rather than students whose SES would be significantly improved by a degree from a prestigious institution. This is because admission is the first hurdle, not the last, and being well off removes potential sources of stress.

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If you look on LinkedIn you'll see the vast majority of "African-American" Ivy League alumni are actually African immigrants. It seems without fail when I run into someone black that's a successful doctor or lawyer they often turn out to be an African immigrant. They're often quite coy about it and will only tell you when you ask them directly.

There's nothing wrong with immigrants but it seems as though immigrants are benefiting from programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.

> programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.

Where is it communicated that this is the intent of these programs? My understanding is that the criteria is simply race (and to an extent, economic conditions).

Should it matter if you’re an immigrant or not if the program is designed to provide an advantage solely on race and economic circumstance? If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.

> If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.

My (lay) understanding is that universities are (were?) doing a careful dance around Regents of the University of California v. Bakke[1], which permitted them to consider the race of an applicant in order to provide the educational benefits associated with a diverse student body, but did not permit them to use their admissions as a tool for administering reparations.

It's also my understanding that their compliance here is more littoral than spiritual, given the widespread on-campus support for reparations in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...

TIL! Thanks for sharing this.

A lot of children of African immigrants are actually outperforming the US population as a whole in regards to education.

The ethnicity with the highest fraction of PhDs is Nigerian.

That is true in pretty much every country with immigrants.

You have a completely different disposition to education if you see it as a chance instead of something you have to endure with respective results.

Given, that doesn't apply to everyone, but is definitely a common occurrence.

I recently learned most Ivy League African-Americans are either biracial like Obama, or from Caribbean parents.

I've been catching whiffs, of a cultural tension between descendants of black families that immigrated from places like Africa and the Caribbean in the mid-20th century, who in my experience seem to benefit those most from affirmative action policies, and black Americans whose families either arrived decades before the civil rights movement, or descended directly from black slaves, and bore the brunt of America's apartheid policies.

I wonder if we'll see a major political bifurcation along those lines in the next decade.

Some have been advocating "American Descendants of Slavery" (ADOS) as an identity specifically for those whose ancestors were victims of slavery in the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...

The Caribbean has a history of African slavery not unlike the U.S.

That is true. However, the US immigration system seems to select for the affluent, the skilled, and the already the successful. Many of them come to the country with existing contacts in positions to aid them through the process, and with specific plans. That means that many of these migrant are able to leapfrog many of most insurmountable structural barriers that black Americans face in terms of capital, debt, skills, policing, and access to an affluent social network by the simple act of being from anywhere else than America.

When they (the affluent ones to whom I'm referring) establish themselves and settle down, they're then in a position to shelter their children from many of the structural inequities faced by the black community writ large, such as access to quality schooling, housing, and living in overpoliced areas.

This does not mean that the descendants of black migrants are immune to racism in the US. Indeed, even the most affluent family can scarcely hope to protect their children from the overt, and even covert acts of conscious and unconscious racism perpetrated by both individuals and our institutions.

But affluence does open doors, and can be used as a buffer against the most systemicly insidious elements of America's segregationist past.

Is that something that Caribbean nations should address, rather than USA? Frankly I don't see how policies that don't benefit ADOS meet the ethical burden that USA universities (especially those such as Ivy League universities who historically benefited from slavery in USA) would seem to have.

I disagree. I think the primary beneficiaries are the universities themselves and their alumni networks. Employers, particularly elite employers, know about affirmative action - and not just racial affirmative action. Job candidates are sometimes judged by employers in the context of advantages they might have received - employers are known to "unconsciously" penalize candidates who list diversity clubs, fraternities (legacies), and sports teams - three signals that a candidate may have received a non-academic boost in college admissions. In the United States, the right sometimes calls this effect w.r.t. race the "Clarence Thomas effect," as he famously struggled to find any law firms that would employ him, despite having a law degree from Yale. Many universities with affirmative action, including elite universities also have a racial gap in the graduation rate and average GPA exiting university - suggesting that some of those black C-GPA Harvard students (well, black C-GPA Princeton students, Harvard doesn't really give Cs) could have B or A students at Carnegie Mellon or Emory and had an easier time finding employment after graduation. So while some members of the minority group may benefit from affirmative action, I'd argue that many more members of the minority are actually hurt by affirmative action, either because they're forced to compete slightly above their abilities or because they're evaluated as if they received unfair advantages by employers after college.

AIUI: As I understand it SES: Socioeconomic status/situation

If you think about it, it's not really surprising. Harvard is not going to take a kid who reads at a 6th grade level, no matter what. They will take an underrepresented minority kid who is probably just short of being an outright admit. And where are those types of kids most likely to come from? The higher income end of the minority group, of course.

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