>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?
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.
- 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.
It's the knowledge and talent caused by those things...