Anti-book bans

You may have heard of book bans, but some states and counties like our local school system have proactively enacted an "anti-book ban." This is a ban on bans, and within the school system, this means parents cannot opt their children out of curriculum with LGBTQ-inclusive texts.

Personality-wise, I love the idea of anti-book bans. Instead of libraries and BOEs being on the defensive from relentless conservative networks, they flip the story and assert the authority and leverage they've had all along. "If you don't like it, tough nuts, we're gonna give kids the opportunity to be more open-minded than you."

From the school board's perspective, I think it is appropriate, if not understandable, to equate this moment to school integration. Back then schools faced the wrath of angry parents, but the right thing to do was to keep letting the schools integrate. 

The message that kids see when they see parents openly protesting is "I am not okay with gay people." People of course have religious convictions against homosexuality. But parents should do well to tread carefully in the manner of how they discuss sexual identity, with LGBT youths from religious family backgrounds having higher risk of suicide. Sayings like "your identity is in Christ and not in being gay" are trite in the same way of "your identity is in Christ and not in being Chinese," because things like race and sex are so profound to our lived experiences that, yes, in theory Christian identity is rooted in Christ, but we minimize the beauty of imago dei by minimizing our particularities.

If we take the evangelical position that being gay is a distortion of the Christian sex ethic, there is still beauty in the distortion. For every gay or gender disphoric person who calls to Jesus, in evangelical lexicon, God is glorified to an even greater extent than a comfortably cis gendered person, because the weakness of man is the boasting in Christ. 

My personality does run contrarian, and that was one of the main appeals of being a Christian in the first place. "Society seems to be fluid or contradictory in gauging what's right and wrong, but God has a clear standard." So for religious parents, they could see this as a discipleship opportunity to have engaging and close conversations with their kids while gaining credibility that they aren't scared and are open to hearing and loving all people.

I am biased to the public school system. The hands-off approach of my parents wouldn't have served me well in areas like sex, drugs, and other sensitive health topics, but thankfully the schools were the safety net to give me really positive and practical information on how to navigate those things. In their message to parents, they cite research showing that "inclusive materials are a key component of a safe and supportive environment for LGBTQ+ students and increase positive psychosocial and educational outcomes." This honestly should be a shared goal across the community and I appreciate the system for the good faith effort.

Affirmative action shower thoughts

A Princeton professor said: 

At Harvard, more than 80% of recruited athletes are admitted. That’s orders of [magnitude] greater than any racial consideration. It also comes with considerable racial implications. 70% of athletes at Harvard are white, whereas only 40% of the student body is.

This is pretty revealing. You could argue the real enemies of equity, exacerbators of exclusivity, and honestly the most obvious elephants at elite colleges are: sports recruiting and legacy. AOC later quoted the same stats I think so I'm in good company.

But the quote also implies that the 40% white student body, while not even at > 50%, is still higher than it "should" be based on standard considerations. And also that, later in the thread, for colleges that don't consider gender they end up with more women admitted. I think that's fascinating.

Now on to shower-borne solutions. Why do people care about getting into elite colleges? I assume: better job opportunities. And subjectively "social prestige," but I'll focus on jobs for now because I think part of the solution is to undercut prestige. So. What if. Hear me out. We had "college blind" job hiring? Or affirmative action with consideration to diversify educational background?

"That's infeasible."

Is it though?

Federal law already bars employers from discriminating against potential or current employees on factors such as gender, race and age ("equal opportunity employer" or "EEO"). What if we simply tacked on educational background to that list?

"Educational background" is becoming more and more of a subjective bar with less and less utility thanks to democratized online learning materials. Personally speaking, college was the biggest waste of time educationally. I learned nothing that was unique to the particular university, and public high school education was much more meaningful overall.

So how could companies implement this? Google already sort of does this with "hiring committees" and so some of my colleagues didn't even attend college. Hiring committees are a detached cabal that have not interacted with the candidate and only look at the merits of the candidate's interview answers. The committee is blind to educational background, gender, and race. To make this equitable, the top of the funnel needs to include an intentionally diverse pool and that's where Google is imperfect, as are all other companies, since recruiters have extreme leeway and discretion on who to get through the screen.

"So you're saying there should be some federal law that asks recruiters to censor the college a candidate came from before presenting to hiring managers, or companies must consider candidates who attended non-elite colleges (>15% admission rate) in the pool, and the law also asks companies to revamp entire campus recruiting strategies, basically eliminating campus recruiting as it exists today?"

"...Yea!" It only sounds impossible because we settle into artificial constraints on what's possible! I think this is more feasible than fighting at the college admissions level, contending with incentives of endowment and sports economics, VERSUS at the employer level, where it's easier to argue college name != performance. Back to the shower for more thoughts.

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 18 - 20