Reply #142: Class is almost as important, and is easier to do something about [View All]

[pedestrian]

Linuxinsurgent wrote: "Whites enjoy de facto priviliges...the analogy is of several escalators...some moving faster than others. The white one is going the fastest...and what affirmative action does is attempt to lift the other groups to the same height traversed by the white escalator, even though their escalator has been going slow or even turned off."

Here's just one concrete example of how. I recently visited a tutoring center (looking for a job), and was amazed at what difference access to for-profit tutoring can make for a child's achievement. The company guarantees that the child's performance will improve by at least one whole grade after 36 hours of tutoring, and 85% of the students do actually improve their grades by that much. When children whose parents can afford such quality tutoring compete with children whose parents can't, the rich students are bound to win. It does seem right that 'hard work' and 'merit' should determine who gets into college, but standardized test scores can't measure that.

I agree with the Carolinian that this is very much a class issue. If class were taken into account, for example by scaling students SAT scores according to family income or something, the 'beneficiaries' of this system would overwhelmingly be black or brown - but the occasional poor white student would not be left out. There ARE poor whites, and their poverty may also well be due to misguided policies - think of the child whose father's Vietnam war experience made him incapable of holding a job or completing an education, for example.

A practical problem with race-based AA as it was practiced, say, in the admissions office at UC Berkeley some years ago is illustrated by this case: A person I know got into UCB because of listing him- or herself as "Hispanic". This student has ONE Hispanic grandparent (the other three are White), comes from a comfortably off family, has English as mother tongue, and both parents are college-educated. I don't see why this student should be ranked before a poor white student whose parents never invested anything into his education. A practical complication about AA based on race or color is that it is hard to formulate clear criteria for who is to benefit without introducing further injustice.

A practical advantage of an AA system based on class (for example by scaling SAT scores according to family income) is the fact that information about income is readily publically available and verifiable. It might eliminate the need to rely on student essays detailing how awful their childhood was... A disadvantage would be a failure to compensate for underachievement due to internalized low expectations - one of the most vicious effects of racism. However, perhaps - just perhaps - an AA system based on class rather than color directly would provoke a little less outrage on the part of conservatives. And these days, getting some acceptance for any kind of AA at all might be a step forward.

The Pedestrian