While everyone was going up about the Supreme Court’s block on President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, the court passed another decision right under our noses. According to NBC News, the court refused to hear the appeal of a Black death row inmate who alleged his jury was picked based on race.
Tony Clark was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to death in the killing of a 13-year-old boy during the robbery of a convenience store back in 2014. His appeal claimed that during the jury selection for his trial, prosecutors unlawfully sought to strike Black jurors based solely on race. That would be in direct violation of the Court’s 1986 ruling that potential jurors can’t be excluded based on race. But alas, Clark’s trial was composed of 11 white people and one Black person.
I don’t see how anonymizing race on college admissions is pure conjecture and a talking point. I agree with the quote you say as if it proves me wrong; if the people doing the admissions do not know the students applying, there can be no racial bias in their selection of students. If that’s conjecture, do you have a reason that would not be the case?
The conjecture is saying there’s no racism. Those are the literal words you used. Then you went on to add in a what if scenario with a very over simplified and rose colored glasses solution. And if you remove race from an application there are still so many ways for people to infer. Your name, city of birth, schools, hobbies, etc. Yes anonymizing applications could work but it’s not as simple as removing the race field. I know this very well as someone who’s been hiring people for 15+ years. The amount of unconscious bias we all have is pretty surprising when you see it demonstrated for yourself.
Then there’s also the problem of once folks get on how are you sure they’re being treated equally. You’re trying to make this a simple problem and it’s much more complex than you can imagine.
Remove the name from the application information too then. I disagree that your city of birth, school, or hobby could give someone enough information to reasonably infer your race.
I don’t think the solution to racism in college admissions is to assume the people selecting will be biased and discriminate the other way around. The solution is to make a procedure where there is no room for anything other than absolutely stupid outliers. Maybe one in a thousand college admissions counselor would try to infer a students race, but that counselor is just terrible at their job in that case (in a world where the pertinent details have been anonymized).
If anything, I think its conjecture to assume there will be an implicit bias even if pertinent information to race is removed from applications.