#also this is a problem oxbridge and similar universities habe been saying for years

[ukfrislandembassy]

See also Britain's recent experiences with Conservative governments with increasing proportions of minority ethnic ministers but also increasingly crueller politics and stupider policies at the same time.

I'm trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn't a political priority to me.

It's good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly "fair" system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won't have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you'll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would've been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I'm just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of "their people" and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes "your people" for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn't true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it's hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say "society is racist, so I guess it's okay for Harvard to be racist too." By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it's hard for me to write about this without feeling like it's all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.