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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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How does class-based AA disadvantage blacks? If blacks are disproportionately poor, then they're disproportionately likely to fall into the category that the class-based AA is looking for. Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots, but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians. Obviously if you measure "black" as a class and look at the average outcomes across all of them it will go down as benefits shift from wealthy black people towards poor white people, but it's not obvious to me (possible, but not obvious) that poor black people, as individuals, would lose out by the switch.

Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots

And, apparently, they lose. Which is why Harvard and the NY magnet schools were in the mess they were in.

Your point might be true, if we took "disadvantaged" to mean "pushed to engage in slanted competition" as opposed to "disproportionately loses in competition". But the latter situation is at least in play now.

but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians.

They will have to compete with a bunch of poor or "poor" Nigerians and other immigrants who are technically lower SES still have some social capital (this is the standard explanation of "model minority" success)

But, again, if people like Hanania are right: both groups are not only taken to the cleaners by Asians now, they will continue to do so indefinitely.

If your argument was for race + class-based affirmative action to cut out well-off Nigerians it'd be one thing. But pure class AA is another thing entirely.