Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

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LBJ gave the commencement speech at Howard more than 50 years ago and said:

That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

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It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.

Then why have the goal posts moved? That’s my only challenge to the status quo. Presumably they’ve moved because moving them is the only way (or at least the only cheap/easy way) to maintain a narrative of injustice. Shouldn't we be able to pursue this vision without frivolously chasing a metric we have absolutely no understand of let alone control over?

It’s subtle but the motives are very different: if you want to maintain a narrative of injustice, then you will find ways to do that. OTOH, if you want to build a narrative of equality, success, and support, then you need to be open to the outcome that racial undertones and the victim status of minorities will fade into history. Thats the entire goal, right?

I think the problem is obviously a racial hierarchy is motivated to pretend that minority status is already faded into history, especially if it isn't faded right now. Similar to how my boss says that his kneecapping my career is in the past now, there's a new peer review quarter and I have new opportunities so why should I be mad? Maybe sure 10 years from now it'll be whatever, but he just sabotaged me last quarter. Of course to him it's water under a boat, he has every motivation to pretend it to be so, and to say my pointing out that I'm still a harmed party to be goalpost moving or whatever nonsense he wants to come up with to say it doesn't exist anymore and therefore he doesn't even have to lift a finger to make it up to me.

It’s important for me to be very precise and clear here: I am not arguing that speaking up and pointing out that you were actively wronged is moving the goalposts. It’s literally not and I’m not trying to silence you or discourage the royal your initiative to do so! I think your boss should probably be fired and you should get a bonus.

There are, however, people making the argument that we need to focus on equality of outcome as the solution (vs firing your boss and paying you damages). And followers of this idealogical doctrine have made political inroads in schooling and government. It’s this behavior specifically that I’m criticizing.

Yes, part of the problem is that we’re such a binary society so these nuances get bucketed into larger issues and it’s all really hard to sort out.

The goal posts never moved. They were always:

- People of color don't experience special violence

- People of color don't experience special rates of poverty

- People of color aren't specially diverted from the pursuit of happiness

We're so far away from this goal that we can only hazily imagine achieving it. For example, white high school dropouts have higher home ownership rates than Black college graduates [0]. Either you think Black people are just bad with credit cards (which would be racist) or you think there's some structural cause.

I think people want a number, like a number of years or an amount of money so we can finally say, "we did it, we made things right." It's even in this opinion. I don't think that's a useful way of looking at it, because no metrics really capture what it's like to be in a marginalized group. Hell we can't even agree on metrics for software engineers; we definitely can't get it right for this.

What we should do instead is create race conscious policies that address inequalities when we find them. We should do this for everyone btw: white people who have been victimized by the opioid epidemic, women who've experienced violence, etc. etc. Race-conscious admissions programs were doing this work for college admissions, but sadly not anymore.

[0]: https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Umb...

I think you jumped to a poorly argued conclusion with:

> What we should do instead is create race conscious policies

Of course, the goalposts you mentioned are good goals. But it’s far from clear that face conscious policies are appropriate or effective.

Appropriateness is, of course, a matter of opinion, but the Supreme Court has decided that the policies in question are unconstitutional. But effectiveness is an empirical matter. For example, in 1996, California banned most affirmative action in public universities. (To be clear, a lot of very well intentioned people at the universities supported affirmative action. Source: personal knowledge.). It took a few years for the situation to settle down, but the results of removing affirmative action seem to have been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the University of California campuses.

It turns out that, just because a policy is well intentioned, it does not follow that it is effective at achieving its good intentions. I could rattle off quite a few examples of policies that fail in this regard.

https://archive.is/bjv8J

> the results of removing affirmative action seem to have been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the University of California campuses

This is incorrect; removing affirmative action was real bad for Black students [0]. The article you cite references the discredited "mismatch" theory also pushed by Justice Thomas. Mismatch theory was never supported by data, and the studies that do seem to support it have huge problems [1]. No serious person thinks it's real.

Race-conscious admissions were an unqualified good for millions of minority students. They're probably only second to Social Security as a US anti-poverty policy. There's no amount of weirdo reasoning or fact twisting that can obscure that.

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/115/6360982?guest...

[1]: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/studies-supporting-mi...

I don’t see the “mismatch” reference. I admit that article is not great. I found a much better article at one point but can’t find it again.

I admit I’m dubious about the study [0]. It says:

> I show that ending affirmative action caused underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality colleges.

This seems like a potentially problematic metric. Drawing conclusions from this depends on the assumption that the applicant pool did not change. It appears that much of UCLA’s post-Prop 209 strategy involved programs to improve their applicant pool. I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.

IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in. (Of course, any admission scheme whatsoever ought to benefit those who are admitted, at least so long as second-order damaging effects from a problematic admission scheme don’t make going to the university in question worse than the alternatives and so long as the university is worth going to in the first place.)

It does appear to be the case, based on terrible but official data that I found, that the fraction of the UCLA student body that is black is similar now to what it was before Prop 209. But I could be misinterpreting what I found. (The recovery was very slow, which is unfortunate.)

The article quotes Heriot referencing Mismatch theory here:

> By eliminating racial preferences, Heriot wrote last week, the 1996 amendment did away with the pressure to admit minority students to competitive institutions their credentials hadn’t prepared them for.

> I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.

The paper is more or less about minority enrollment going up at non-UC schools, so UCLA's outreach is irrelevant here.

> IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in.

Why?

I would challenge you to cite any government program in history in any country that has successfully achieved "equalization of outcome for racial groups." For those advocating extreme measures and philosophies, the burden of proof should be very high.

>It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.

How does this work, in practice? Look at the comments here; do you think one half of the population is going to vote for politicians who want to implement a special tax that sees money from their pay check going to their neighbors, based on race? That will never happen.

> It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.

Agreed, but as the parent comment said, what's the end-goal? What are the metric(s) whereby we can say "things are now right", or even, "things are approaching the direction of right-ness"?

p25, p50, p75 wealth among Black and white families for starters.

I wholly agree with everything above the dashes/hyphens, but I partially disagree with the bottom part and a related position I suspect you hold. Maybe we will end up dedicating trillions of dollars through solid reform, but that figure shouldn't be based on historical reckonings of damages. The history of oppression and inequality in the US is gross and tragic, but the past isn't the present isn't the future. There are enough actual issues to solve already. Now, onto attacking a stance you may or may not hold. While certain groups (I won't deign to be imprecise with wording) are heavily disadvantaged heavily from historical racism, it still ultimately remains the sole responsibility and capability of each individual to forge their own path. If the culture is flawed, so too may the people not sow healthy crops to reap. To be sure, this may not turn out to be a significant issue, but it's something to be mindful of throughout reforms. Truly though, I hope for the best.

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