Are Race-Based Firings Legal? Twilio's About to Find Out
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>> If certain groups of employees are affected more than other groups, determine if you can adjust your layoff/RIF selection criteria to limit the impact on those groups, while still meeting your business's needs.
>> For example, you decide to lay off the most recently hired employees due to budget constraints. Female employees account for 30% of your workforce and 85% of the employees scheduled for layoff. Determine whether you can adjust your layoff criteria in a way that allows you to meet your financial goals while also reducing the impact on female employees. For example, you might determine whether alternative layoff criteria, such as employees' profitability, productivity or expertise, would enable you to reach the desired financial outcome and result in the layoff of fewer female employees.
That’s nuts. The US government literally suggests companies to cook up fake metrics to achieve desired results.
That’s a political calculation not a logical one. Also in practice members of protected groups who are over represented at a specific business can be disproportionately subject to layoffs to ensure the protection of less represented minorities. The general bias is toward integrating businesses and favouring protected classes for better or for worse.
You should hire based on talent and experience. And if the company is all white, then be it, that's the market.
Of course that way doesn't fix racism, but the US way also doesn't.
Typically when people are using the phrase "white people", they are not including latinos so I would rate "America has far more poor white people than poor non-white people" mostly false.
Also I really hate how the standard demographics in the US are WHITE, BLACK, ASIAN, or OTHER with an additional binary of HISPANIC or NON-HISPANIC.
I recently moved to a majority hispanic area, 80ish percent. It was a bit of culture shock for me in a lot of ways, one of which is you better have cash.
Everyone I've hired to do anything will only take cash. If you offer a check, they'll sometimes say no, sometimes say OK, but I have to add tax. Not one would accept a credit card. Plumbers, electricians, handymen, guys with 50k dollar trucks and 80k dollar skid steers.
I don't mean to intend to paint this as a solely hispanic thing, this is just the first place I've lived that functions that way. The guy who did our floor was white, and made the same demands in fact.
It occurred to me there's likely a not insignificant amount of people making 6 figures who are according to the government, below the poverty line.
I finally found the following data source, and multiplied out the population count by race with the percentage below 100% of the poverty line by race.
If you have a different data source, or methodology, please share.
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Poverty%20by%20race&t...
White alone, not Hispanic or Latino 188537199 Less than 100% of poverty line 9.5% = 17,911,033
Versus
Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race) 61398400 Less than 100% of poverty line 17.5% = 10,744,720
By absolute count, the assertion that White, Hispanic population have more people in poverty than White, non-Hispanic population, appears to be incorrect.
From the data, there are 324173084 people in the US, with an overall poverty rate of 12.8%, meaning that 41,494,154 people are in poverty. 17,911,033 White non-Hispanic in poverty
41,494,154 - 17,911,033 = 23,583,121 (rest of the population)
So, the White Non Hispanic Population in Poverty is less than the number of non (White Non Hispanic) Population.
So, neither of you were correct?
But there are a ton of poor white people in the US. Significantly more than any other single race.
Thank you for correcting me.
I agree that you shouldn’t hire unqualified people. However, oftentimes as a hiring manager you have a bunch of relatively equivalent candidates (let’s say the top 5 of the 100 that applied). In this case there isn’t really a clear choice of who is better and diversity metrics can and should play a role in the hiring decision.
Also, how the hell does “perspective” matter for say…an accountant? Programmer? Vet tech? I’d buy it in marketing, product development, and some other random situations, but as a whole?
What quota is “enough” to overcome this (unmeasurable) “unconscious bias” that allegedly exists?
I don’t want “someone like me” in positions of power over me. I have no idea what that’s such a popular phrase in America. I want someone vastly better than me in positions of power.
When are these slackers going to start demonstrating their worth!?
Given that scientific discourse and outcomes fluctuate, we can assume the same is true social science.
Furthermore, social science is much more dependent on current fashionable political trends. This can be seen in the example of the American Psychological Association accepting recent political topics such as "toxic masculinity" [1] as new definitions in psychological phenomena.
Check out this PhD's work to show how usage of bombastic identity politics terminology increased in mainstream journalism in a non-organic way. It seems driven by top-down institution-based entryism. [2] & [3]
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner
[2] "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
[3] "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy f*** s**'"
From [1]:
> "Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly."
Masculinity kept humanity alive in the face of various dangerous precipices facing a group of social animals seeking to survive during the course of their evolution.
Just because it has become recently politically fashionable to discount it, does not mean it is harmful.
Nor do I believe any absolute-ist interpretation that boys suppress emotions, or that society forces them to suppress emotions. It varies across time & space-- relative to culture, which fluctuates.
To make a blanket statement on the concept is just plain silly, in my view. Human emotions, cultures, and societies are not static.
Therefore any sort of claim by any institution that their <some number> of years of study results in <some outcome> which speaks for <some absolute phenomena> in my opinion, again, is just plain silly.
And it attempts to gatekeep healthy masculinity-- again, pure silliness which demonstrates the nanny mentality of those who attempt such gatekeeping.
Why is that? To me, it seems like you're saying masculinity diametrically opposes femininity.
> Just because it has become recently politically fashionable to discount it, does not mean it is harmful.
I agree that masculinity in itself is not harmful. I believe you are conflating the specific term "toxic masculinity" with masculinity in general, though. I also believe that there are toxic aspects to masculinity that absolutely cause harm in many facets of life; for example, educational barriers, suicide rate, mental illness, and incarceration are all much higher in the male population. I don't think that these are aspects of masculinity that one must accept hand-in-hand with the benefits (earnings potential, proportion of leadership positions, etc). I would call these aspects of masculinity toxic.
> To make a blanket statement on the concept is just plain silly, in my view. Human emotions, cultures, and societies are not static.
To the extreme, this means nothing concrete can be said about human emotions, culture, and societies. I know you don't believe that.
But you raise an interesting possibility; did the modern notion of masculinity always exist? If, say, a past society (or modern, non-Western culture) achieved lower suicide rates in teenage boys, would it not be worth studying how those societies treated masculinity?
> Therefore any sort of claim by any institution that their <some number> of years of study results in <some outcome> which speaks for <some absolute phenomena> in my opinion, again, is just plain silly.
Would it help to point out that these studies have scientific methodologies; for example, they measure different treatment outcomes among a large and diverse enough population such that a statistical conclusion can be made?
> And it attempts to gatekeep healthy masculinity- again, pure silliness which demonstrates the nanny mentality of those who attempt such gatekeeping.
That's certainly a take I didn't get from reading the publication. The APA doesn't seem to be under the delusion that they can control how masculinity is viewed in society, anyway. To me, they have identified evidentiary harms caused to society as a whole through the negative conditioning of boys, given that conditioning a name that you disagree with, and have measured successful results by directly addressing that conditioning in psychological assessments. I am struggling to see a downside here.
What statistical conclusion is being made here? How does one quantify what is “toxic masculinity” and what isn’t?
The APA-- the professional org. which represents the field of psychology in the USA--[1] literally instituted a definition of "toxic masculinity".
If that isn't an attempt to control masculinity in society, I don't know what is.
[1] "APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 133,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students as its members." https://www.apa.org/about
The “structure” of the economy doesn’t benefit at all from a precarious underclass. It would be better if people had savings! Welfare and unemployment insurance is a drag on the economy.
You need to ask yourself if these statements you’re making are facts. Are they? How did you come to believe them? (They’re not, and there’s a ton of evidence on this matter.)
The reason for this was that all of the company's clients were also companies that were mostly comprised of people of that same nationality, many who spoke limited English.
Because this company was small, everyone wore many hats, including technical staff having to interact with the clients.
So while a candidate of a different nationality/ethnicity/race could technically be hired, the odds of this happening was extremely unlikely - because the language in question was usually not spoken by people outside of this nationality (this was nearly 15 years ago, things have changed a bit now).
The one employee who was of a different nationality was part of that tiny exception - he had picked up the language from somewhere.
Would you classify this hiring policy as racist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
Of course this only describes how a legal framework might negotiate between adverse impacts and technical merit. In terms of who has the responsibility of fixing the ripples of current and historical wrongdoings between races, I don't think businesses are the right place to start. By the time it gets to business, asking people to make potentially unmeritorious decisions is a kind of corruption.
Society-wide grievances ought to be addressed at the national level via a reparations program which funds education and family.
While better laws are conceivable, this is what judges are there for, to determine if the intent and effect was harming someone based on race. The gov doesn't force them to use race metrics, it just sues them if they, let's say, layoff 5k people and 4900 are all of a certain race and that happens to be 99% of people of that race. That doesn't make the company guilty, it just forces them to justify in front of a jury their reasoning (perhaps people of that race all worked in one department that was really not needes?). Their aversion to lawsuits is what drives their insanity.
If you can prove that all the applicants of a certain race did not meet an objective criteria which can be scrutinized by outside industry experts then I see no problem with excluding those people and I have never heard of the EEOC suing companies otherwise (although I would be glad to be educated on this), and you will find many companies do have entire all white or all some nationality (east or south asian in tech) departments solely based on objective metrics.
I am just saying, no law forced twilio so perhaps blame twilion in this case instead of the law/gov?
I think the way Title VII has contributed to a competitive DEI culture is under-discussed. Specifically, because the EEOC has this unfalsifiable notion of discrimination, it drives companies to compete on "seeming undiscriminatory" (because each company has to show that it is doing better than the median, which has a "no child left behind" effect of raising the median) which mostly amounts to increasingly ridiculous shenanigans while trying to meet the standard set by the letter of the law. For example, the structure of EEOC Title VII inquisitions pressures companies to search extra hard to hire diverse candidates from a fixed size pipeline (the only way to make this work is to relax qualification requirements while pretending qualification requirements aren't relaxed, and maybe to fire any employees who fail to play along), but they can only go so far before they run up against the letter of the law which prohibits them from, say, openly firing people for their race.
EDIT: Of course this submission got flagged. :eye-roll:
This assumes worker pipelines are fixed which, practically, they aren't. You can increase flows to the pipeline by increasing outreach or incentivizing attainable qualifications. You can also seek trainees rather than day 1 contributors, which admittedly _is_ "relax[ing] qualification requirements" but has the trade-off of providing more purpose-fit employees when they do start contributing.
Moreover, the point of my comment was how the EEOC's notion of discrimination is pretty much "whatever we think is discrimination", so companies have to compete to appear not to discriminate, which manifests as increasingly giving preferential treatment to minorities without actually running afoul of the law as interpreted by the courts. So even if tech companies adopt your suggestions this year, next year they'll be the standard and companies will have to find something else to stay compliant.
Progressive causes have some of the best opportunities right now to win and make actual change. Instead they’re alienating people as much as is possible by taking their issues to ridiculous extremes.
Twilio CEO: Layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32855380 - Sept 2022 (68 comments)
Twilio promises ‘anti-racist’ layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32849920 - Sept 2022 (4 comments)
Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837802 - Sept 2022 (436 comments)
A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345 - Sept 2022 (197 comments)
Twilio cutting 11% – Letter from CEO [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250 - Sept 2022 (104 comments)
Unless you think the very concept of antiracism is a problem.
It’s a dog whistle. You might be familiar with the concept, it is commonly used these days. Like when we rightly reject the hypocrisy of “all lives matter” when uttered by a white supremacist.
Again, this might well be nothing, in which case clarifications would help.
> Unless you think the very concept of antiracism is a problem.
When anti-racism is just racism with a different target, yes, we have a problem.
I understand the desire to want to know more here, like, what did Jeff Lawson mean specifically?
Call me crazy, but maybe the right thing to do is not get bent totally out of shape over a press release and instead just ask, "Jeff, what did you mean by an antiracist lens? Could you explain more about that?"
The point I'm making is that press releases around layoffs are often rushed, and might not actually represent the whole story. Maybe we shouldnt call someone guilty before they get a chance to elaborate?
a) you are extremely stupid
b) you are super woke and are using this as a signalling opportunity
Extremely stupid people sometimes run billion-dollar companies but it's the exception.
You must believe one of those if you think my previous is an example of b).
Right now I see a whole lot of assumptions and very little evidence.
The best case of your apologetics amounts to: maybe they did normal layoffs and they're just framing it in an arbitrary way so as to acknowledge woke beliefs. Which is a restatement of the virtue signalling described by the commenter above.
You might say that we therefore looking at reviews through an unbiasing lens.
Using an antiracist lens could mean they had one person in the room whose responsibility was to tie the conversation back to data about employee performance rather than, "well, I have a hard time understanding person x, let's fire them."
It's not just black and white, there are many ways this could be an innocent policy by Twilio. It could be what you describe, it could just be "we nominated someone to speak up in the meeting, but didn't really listen to them much".
My point is that we don't know. You've made up your mind, but it's not that simple.
Whether their policy was directly effective toward that end or just another layer of obtuse bureaucratic process like you describe, Twilio is signalling that they applied antiwhite ideology to their employment decisions.
There are actions you can take that do not have anything to do with whiteness.
If you tell a racist joke or use a racist slur, and I tell you not to do that, I am acting in an anti racist manner. It cost white folks nothing.
All antiracist means is "actively against racism", meaning when you observe racism you take action.
That's the value of fake "diversity" (excluding the only diversity that matters, diversity of opinion - which is effectively forbidden by every large corporation in the states on any topic that is even remotely sensitive).
Admitting to this in writing is bonkers. I hope they’ll get the hundred lawsuits.
How so? A policy that gives better or worse treatment to someone because of a perceived “race” (which is itself non-sense all in the case of homo sapiens) IS racist. Are you disagreeing with that?
We can argue about whether we like it the way it is, whether it is punching up or down, or whether it is a good kind of racism, but there is no way around the fact that this is racism.
> There are several marginalized groups that are still vastly underrepresented in business. Giving them a modicum of preference in hiring and firing decisions is barely making the gap smaller.
So you are in fact saying that this is a good kind of racism, justified by History and the current socio-economical situation.
> In Animal Farm they Orwell was satirizing oligarchy.
Not at all. The story is about oppressed turning oppressors in the name of some form of ostensibly egalitarian ideology. As has happened countless times through History. It is a warning about what happens when you start using your enemy’s weapons: you become the enemy and betray your ideals. We cannot fight racism with racism, or else we just end up another shade of racists.
> The oligarchy in America is still very much white and male.
That is very much a problem. You are not going to solve it by firing white people. This will just give more ammunition to populists.
Yeah, well that's exactly my point. If firing white people isn't going to solve racism, then this isn't exactly the "last straw" before we end up in an upside society. We're still ice skating uphill. And really the populists don't need a lot of ammunition since they're always willing to invent grievances when they can't find a real one. I mean, you're doing it right now. I don't think we should be setting policy based on what the worst people in our society are going to be offended by.
> So you are in fact saying that this is a good kind of racism, justified by History and the current socio-economical situation.
Yeah, basically. You can debate semantics if you want but it's beside the point. The term "racism" generally implies not just racial bias, but bias born of animus. This isn't animus. There's no hatred directed towards white people. There's an implicit assumption at work that laid off white workers will have a much easier time getting hired somewhere else and data says that's true. Especially a place like Twilio that probably employs loads of college graduates with technical savvy.
We don't want to make the gap smaller. That's equality of outcome which is illiberal and anti-individualist. You are punishing White people because of their skin color, which is textbook racism.
We want to level the playing field and create equality of opportunity. Invest in poor communities. Build housing. Open the borders. Elect Democrats. Recruit from community colleges instead of informal networks.
If you look at Fox News, Daily Wire, and so on, it's mostly victim narrative around anti-White discrimination. You're literally helping to elect Republicans with this stuff and bringing an end to democracy in the US.
Anti-poverty is less performative than "anti-racism", but it achieves more with less negative side effects. The funding goes to Black communities in a higher proportion than it goes to any other community, because they tend to be poorer. So you get your asymmetric boost without having to explicitly perpetrate any racism and without giving Fox News ammunition.
Also, decriminalize drugs, especially marijuana.
And in this case what Twilio did was of their own volition. It wasn't mandated by any statute. You're arguing they should be legally prevented from voluntarily enacting anti-racist policy? Do you another word for anti-anti-racism?
Can racist clowns like this please consider downstream effects. You're doing things that will elect Republicans and bring about fascism. Please, stop with the anti-egalitarian wokeness that indirectly harms the groups you're pretending to support. Open your borders, build housing, build infrastructure in poor communities, elect Democrats. Stop the equal outcome illiberalism and virtue signalling.
An Asian or white person must score substantially higher than a Hispanic or black person to achieve entrance into the same university.
You also lump Asians and white people together in a way that's inaccurate. In fact, by some accounts, white people are the largest beneficiaries of current college admissions practices at top universities, thanks to legacy admissions practices / donations, a preference for athletes, and race-based admissions policies.
I recognize the last two of these may seem counterintuitive, so I'll explain. With regards to athletics, the sports represented at top schools lean heavily towards those played in affluent, predominately white areas — think squash, crew and tennis.
With regards to race-based admissions, yes Hispanics and black people benefit (to be fair, they almost never benefit from legacy), but the real "victims" are Asians, whose representation at Ivy League schools has remained flat since around 1990, in spite of the fact that the Asian American population has almost tripled over the same time period.
That said, if what Twilio did is what is claimed, its a massive, ridiculous unforced error.
> the Chief Executive of a publicly-traded company seems to have admitted [...] that he conducted race-based layoffs
The opposite. Lawson is trying to say he conducted a completely fair race-neutral layoff. Part of this process included remaining cognizant of any biases against particular races in order keep it neutral.
Whether that's what took place is up to debate, but he certainly didn't claim it was a race-based layoff and saying so without any numbers or even internal anecdotes is dishonest journalism.
I mean, he could omitted the virtue-signalling and everyone would assume it's just your typical recession-layoff that's been trending.
> As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
This doesn't seem to suggest a concern about biases in the layoff process, it strongly seems like he's arguing that "marginalized communities" depend more on these jobs than "unmarginalized communities". Indeed, if he was talking about biases in the layoff process, why would he say "marginalized communities"? I don't even know what that means in that context. Biases in the layoff process affect the individuals laid off. Of course, it also affects those individuals' broader communities, but factoring those communities into the calculus is the definition of biasing the decision (putting aside the implicit assumption that individuals are necessarily members of race-based communities).
I agree that declaring and executing race targeted layoffs should be illegal.
> you’re giving the CEO the most optimistic end of the spectrum
No. I think he's honestly trying to say "One particular kind of biased layoff hurts one group more than another kind of bias so I'm trying hard to make sure there's no bias", albeit poorly.
I'm definitely pessimistic that he can achieve this even if his intent is to be completely impartial. There's also a chance he has no intention of being fair which I agree with you should be illegal, but I don't see evidence of that yet and just assuming malice is presumptuous.
Like can the journalist at least dig up 5 X-race guys who got fired and 1 Y-race guy who didn't and then say "see?" Nah he just went straight from Press Release -> Pitchfork mob without any legwork.
At the end of the day it necessarily comes down to some human deciding that we have too much of x race and thus firing someone for their race.
The way to correct the racial balance in a company (again one large enough for statistics of employee vs national or regional racial make up to be relevant), is to first address your hiring practices and college or university outreach. Because the reality is people are still more likely to get to the interview stage via nepotism: one of your employees gets a hiring or intern suggestion from their old PI, your employees go back to the school they went to for career fair/outreach programs. Historically for example tech companies did very little outreach at any of the HBCUs or community colleges, which for historical (often racist) reasons are where the major you get a much more representative of society group of people. Aside from anything else that not only means talented people from those schools are less likely to get the experience from, say, interning, but also it means you're missing out on the talent that didn't get lucky enough in where they were born or who their parents were.
What I'm trying to say is that I do not believe you can in any way fire your way to a less racist company, but you can do a lot to fix it by making sure your hiring process isn't automatically removing swathes of the population due not to explicit racism but simply habit and the path of least resistance. You shouldn't be in a position where you are saying yes or no about a person simply because of their race, and saying yes or no simply because of the school they went to is at a gross statistical level fairly equivalent to doing just that.
[1] Because statistics
Not nepotism
>your employees go back to the school they went to for career fair/outreach programs
Also not nepotism
Merriam Webster defines nepotism as "favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship"
In this case kinship does not mean family. You have a kinship with your PI, you have a kinship with your school. The favoritism is the act of bypassing the hiring processes available to people who do not share kinship with you.
If you want to argue about "kinship" meaning family, MW defines it as being "the quality or state of being kin". The example sentences are "Despite our close kinship, canines and humans are quite different", "He feels a strong kinship with other survivors of the war", "feelings of kinship between the team's players and their fans". None of which mention any familial relationship.
If you think that getting to skip the normal submit CV/resume to a website and hope for the best, and generally go straight to an in person interview is not favouritism I can only assume that you have only ever done one or the other of those options, and so have no awareness of the immense advantage you get by not just being one of thousands of resumes going through recruiters that are doing randomized keyword searches, and just getting to sit in an interview and answer questions.
This is nepotism: you get an advantage over others in the hiring path based not on your abilities, but based instead on just having the correct connections.
So if you happen to have a PI with a former student now working at X, and the PI forwards your resume directly to them you have an advantage over everyone else, who does not have that relationship (kinship if you will).
Similarly if you go to a school with former students at company Y, and those former students come to collect resumes at your school, you have an advantage over people who went to schools without that relationship.
If you go to church and another person there works for company Z, and you hand them your resume, and they then say "let's interview him" you have benefited from a relationship that is unavailable to others. This last one is a direct example from my personal experience. As an interviewer I was looking at a resume that would not have got past the normal application phase, and even if it did this candidate would not have got past a phone screen.
Now it's important to realize that if as a candidate you can get to an in person interview I would estimate you're already well on your way to an offer. Interviews are not a perfect system, and you can be a fairly middling candidate and get an offer. I'm not going to say you have to really blow it to get rejected, but you sure as hell don't need to be a perfect and amazingly flawless person either.
It's important to realize most people will think you're crazy for that.
For twilio, I disagree, but, I am sure they will argue it isn't unequal treatment since hiring can also be done based on race (equity vs equality, reverse affirmative action??). Obviously making reparations by artificially harming others based on race is really fucked up. But I suspect like most corporate diversity crap it is calculated to make the right people happy and make profit.
Anti racist/anti oppression does not mean “anti white”.
>You're black and applying to college? You're obviously stupid [0] and we'll add 200 SAT points to your application. Oh no, we'd never add points on means based testing, we'd end up having the poors in Harvard if we did. Why are you asking?
It's the knowledge and talent caused by those things...
- they're a practice originally designed to keep up out Jews and Catholics (not in a veiled "politically correct" way, that's what they were openly for: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23055549)
- the legacies they uphold were established at a time where blacks couldn't even go to the same schools are whites. Ruby Bridges is in only now her 60s after desegregating a black elementary school. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges)
It really seems if this is about equality in schooling, you wouldn't see one complaint without the other.
You'd think that people against racism would be all over this if they actually cared about minorities.
Funny how this cuts both ways.
Or maybe we're just replying to what the article said and not everything that's happened since the beginning of time.
It sounds to me like this was more about martyring yourself than anything on topic.
The french philosopher Pierre Bourdieu discribed multiple forms of "capital" any individual can accumulate in order to get successful:
- economic capital (actual money, houses etc)
- social capital (the contacts you have to people who can help you out)
- symbolic capital (your ability to simulate a certain socioeconomic status in a way so others belive you are also from their class of society — so the way you look, dress, speak, what music you listen to etc)
- cultural capital (the actual knowledge you accumulated by learning, reading, practise etc)
The more any individual has in each of these categories the easier success is going to be for them. Many of these categories have a huge inherited part as well. Even if your parents are poor academics for example they might teach you how to speak a certain upperclass language, have good contacts and cultural capital for example.
Black people in the US have had a (much, much) worse starting point in all of these capital forms and some of those deficits will effectively bar anybody from that socioeconomic background from studying, even if they are a very talented person.
Quotas like these are the recognition that existing cultural biases are instutionalized and you have to counterbalance them to a degree, just to make them fair.
If you ran a marathon and the guy next to you was not only held back for 30 minutes at the start, but also had to carry a bag of bricks and learn a new language while running (and none of that by his own choice), you'd hardly complain if the guy's run was judged in a different way than yours, or would you?
This is essentially what something like this boils down to. People from a poor socioeconomic background cannot lean onto their or their parents contacts (lack of social capital), they cannot lean on their or their parents money (lack of exonomical capital), they cannot lean on their sophisticated way of expression (lack of symbolic capital) — they in fact have to learn that new way of expressing themselves if they want to be taken seriously — and they cannot lean onto their cultural capital as people from rich educated families will naturally have a headstart here as well.
Societies with less steep socioeconomic divides tend to be safer, more productive and happier, so it is only rational.
The current race-based policies consider Obama's daughters "marginalized" and an Ukrainian orphan "privileged". That is sort of awful and illogical.
And I agree with your judgment about the observation you made, but I think one can always create better policy in that field, but the perfect should not be the enemy of the good here.
As long as that kind of thinking is widespread in the US nearly none of the nice things will be possible.
But instead, top schools in the US are becoming even more entrenched as institutions for the rich, by the rich.