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.
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.