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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

This is for faculty positions, which are employment. Ironically, that has stricter non-descrimination provisions than school admissions.

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Not in public California universities. Racial discrimination has been banned in California public university since Proposition 209 was passed in 1996.

Which democrats tried to repeal in 2020.

Because it was used to achieve diversity goals, and 209 prevents that. Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies). Whether or not this is the right way to go about it is indeed a split issue evidenced by the 57/43 2020 vote and 55/45 vote that passed the original 96 proposition.

The proposition you failed to link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673427

> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).

Does anyone actually check whether recipients of these de facto reparation actually have been affected by any of that? As far as I can tell, nobody does, because nobody cares, it’s literally just based on the skin color.

The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color. For example, in the 1930's, the Home Owner's Loan Corp. mapped out and literally redlined black areas, making it harder for homes to be bought and sold without paying extra in interest[0]. From Wikipedia[1]:

> The effects of redlining, as noted in HOLC maps, endures to the present time. A study released in 2018 found that 74 percent of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64 percent of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.

The linked page[0] goes into more detail about how disastrous this was and the impact on wealth it has to this day. Considering how neighborhoods were even less integrated then than they are now, it's safe to say the correlation of redlining to skin color was very high.

0: https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimi...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Owners%27_Loan_Corporatio...

What has a higher median income: African-Americans, or Poland?

Except that some of the ethnic groups (Asian Americans) that are being discriminated against by this policy were also discriminated against by redlining back then.

> The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color.

For many black skinned people in America, sure. For all? Certainly not. There are millions of African immigrants and their descendants in America, who have not experienced any of this. Does anyone bother to differentiate them from the American descendants of slaves? No, it really is all about skin color.

> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).

Reparations would at least be a coherent policy. But Prop 16 proponents also want the policies to favor Latinos, who given the demographics of California would by far be the primary beneficiary of such policies. But Latinos enjoy similar income mobility to whites. Favoring Latinos over whites isn’t “reparations” but just straight up racial discrimination. Ironically, Prop 16 was voted down in every single Latino-majority county in the state.

Ya, this is why I gave myself the out by saying it’s a divisive topic- a lot would be solved by having specifics for reparation laid out and a deadline for when such would end, but such a policy is likely to have so much against it (too much v not enough, general dissident for giving away money, whether or not it would even be legal on the basis of discrimination) that proxy bills that move the needle (somewhat) with (somewhat) negative side-effects are what we end up with.

If you’re going to discriminate based on skin color, it seems to me that a narrower policy that applies to the 6% of California that’s black would be an easier sell than a broader policy that ropes in the additional 40% that are Latino.

I think there’s a simpler explanation: most of the people behind Prop 16 are racist. Their only knowledge of race is the black-white dichotomy and they categorize Latinos as black for political purposes because that's the only framework they have for thinking about people with dark skin.

Reparations, once in effect, would never end.

Prop 209 bans racial discrimination, but UC does it in hiring anyway through a number of means. For example, although Prop 209 bans taking race into account in the hiring decision, it doesn't ban taking it into account in earlier phases, like preparation of shortlists. If a department's shortlist for hiring a professor is found to have a bad proportion of under-represented minorities, the department can be punished by informal means such as being denied future hires. There are several other tricks that the administration does to promote race-based hiring and admissions, with the overall effect that Prop 209 is nullified through policies that are never put into writing.

> Racial discrimination has been banned in California

someone should send a memo to remind countless california institutions who nevertheless persist

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