Hi, a few thoughts. I don't disagree with all your recommendations -- although I reject the idea that race-based analysis and policy is wrong. I think class based and race based policies both have legitimate purposes, as I explain in detail in my book Colorblind. I won't go into all that here.

But I wanted to just comment on the anonymization and contextualization scheme for jobs. Because these ideas demonstrate the difficulty of dealing with class without specifically addressing racism, and that is what I explain in greater detail in the book.

If I read you correctly you are advocating these steps as a way to remove the risk of racial bias (since no one would know the applicants' race) and yet provide some important background info that would allow an employer or college to think, "hey, this applicant went to a school or grew up in a place with less resources but they got pretty solid grades and scores anyway, so that's more impressive than the one with the tutors and prep school background etc."

I appreciate the contextualization piece a lot, and agree that this kind of holistic assessment is what we need.

But there are some serious limitations to doing this in a color blind way. Even if I agreed that color blindness was preferable here (and I don't because I think racial barriers faced by people, separate from class, are part of the context employers need), I don't think the anonymization part actually provides for true color blindness anyway. Thus, if your idea wouldn't get the benefits of CB you make for it, the only issue is contextualization, and that is done better in a color-conscious way.

Let me explain:

The problem with anonymization of CVs, in terms of whether it really gets you color blindness is that:

1. If I tell you what school I attended and what neighborhood I grew up in (or postal code, let's say), there is a good chance you will know enough about the area to know what my racial identity likely is, because that's how racially isolated our neighborhoods and schools are, still, in the US.

2. If you don't already know this information it will take you two minutes to find it online. So anyone inclined to discriminate racially, based on biases against Black or Latino employees for instance, will be able to do so despite anonymization.

And then, worst of all, because it can’t be proved that I knew an applicant’s race (even if I may have known or looked up the school and neighborhood and made an educated guess for reasons of bias), I can’t be accused of racism or unlawful discrimination after the fact. So you’ve just made it impossible to stop discrimination legally, even as you haven’t made it remotely difficult to actually DO discrimination.

This means:

3. The benefits of colorblindness, even theoretically--the inability of racists to discriminate because they would reman behind a veil of racial ignorance--would not really obtain in your plan. The only people for whom it would work and short circuit their racism are the people who probably weren't likely to discriminate anyway.

But meanwhile:

4. Not having racial identifiers would remove an important piece of context, which otherwise well-intended employers and college admissions people might need and usefully consider in hiring and admissions decisions, making it more likely that they would then overlook Black and brown talent. This is because if I am a presumptively non-racist employer or admissions officer, but I don't know you're Black, I might simply think, "oh this person went to a middle class school and grew up in a middle class neighborhood, or even went to a well resourced affluent school and grew up in an upper middle class area, but they only got Bs in school or a mediocre test score, or whatever" and then count that against that person.

But this would ignore that:

a) Black folks who go to relatively affluent schools still face racial mistreatment (tracked into lower level classes, less access to AP and honors classes),and ,

b) are often on financial aid at those private schools (which exist now, putting aside your plan to abolish them), so they face obstacles in terms of additional home resources not faced by whites in those schools. So in other words, the fact they went to the same school doesn't mean their situations were the same.

In fact:

c) Even some kids of color in public schools are in "choice schools" that are more affluent and entered via lottery, away from their neighborhood. So which would the employer or college count more: the affluent school and education it presumably provided, or the working class neighborhood, and how does one balance those?

Well, with actual identifiers including race, or with interviews that make it sorta obvious what a person's race is, I can perhaps gain a sense of that. But without that info, I'm flying blind with only partial information.

Ultimately, the problem with schemes like this is that they presume, against all evidence to the contrary, that the only real obstacles Black people face, for instance, are class related. Middle class and above Black folks don't really face serious racism in this worldview which is incredibly wrong. Embarassingly wrong in fact. I go into great detail about this in Colorblind, but here is one example of this:

We know from 30 years of social science research that Black students from upper middle class and even affluent backgrounds do worse on standardized tests than white kids from poor families. Much worse in fact.

So, if I'm an employer or college and I see test score info (perhaps you would get rid of this too, but I didn't see that in your piece), as part of what I might consider along with grades, I might think "why did this person score so low, or mediocre when they went to this great school and didn't grow up poor?" and then I'd pass on them as an employee or college admittee...

Problem is, we know that part of the reason those Black test takers do worse even when they aren't poor, is because of something called stereotype threat (see the work of Claude Steele, Josh Aronson, etc), which creates test anxiety even for the well prepared black student (and especially for them, actually), because they are especially afraid of confirming negative stereotypes and therefore end up doing worse on the tests. Unless an employer (or one of these universities you think should make it even harder to get in) knows about an applicant's racial background, they will only see the lower score, and not be able to take something like stereotype threat into account, which would not only perpetuate unfairness but also result in really great employees or uni students being overlooked.

But let's take it out of the racial aspect altogether.

Here's an example of how unwieldy this would be, at least here in the states.

I grew up in an upper-middle class postal code/community, and went to middle to upper middle class public schools. If that was all you knew about me, you would think I had lots of resources and advantages, just by virtue of that community and school. And you wouldn't be wrong, per se. Those things did offer advantages. and my being white helped too.

However it you assumed I was similar to all the other people in the same postal code or school, you would be very wrong. I lived in the lowest rent apartment complex in the area (in an area where most were home owners). My parents made very little money. I didn't have the extras that many of them did. So if you looked at my grades (a B average) and abysmal test scores, you would think "this guy must be an idiot or at least not a very hard worker," because with all those advantages what's his excuse for these scores and grades?

So under your scheme, I wouldn't have been able to go to college, and employers wouldn't have had much info to go on other than where I grew up and what school I attended so they would mark me down in evaluations too, so I wouldn't have gotten a very good job either.

And many of the Black kids in my school, who lived in a more working class postal code a few miles away, would have been even worse off. They would have been judged as to their average test scores too, since they went to such a "good school." They too would have been kept from college in most cases, despite ability, and then from lots of jobs, because they would have been seen as not living up to the expectations one has for people coming out of a school like that.

Bottom line, things are just much more complicated and nuanced than this scheme suggests. and in general, I think colleges and employers need to consider MORE information, not less, when evaluating merit, ability, and suitability for certain colleges or jobs. By limiting information we increase the likelihood of getting it wrong, almost axiomatically.