But as the experiment went on, researchers began encountering anecdotal evidence that surprised them. The people who moved out of poor neighborhoods were healthier. When they went back and measured the differences between people who got vouchers and people who didn’t, the results were remarkable: The people who got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods had significantly lower rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
.. But the HUD study, and subsequent research, have shown that something more than race, individual behavior, or genetics is taking a toll on the health of people who live in poor neighborhoods: stress.
.. In much the same way, being late for school, unable to make your car payment, worried about where your next meal will come from, or feeling unjustly scrutinized because of your skin color aren’t immediate physical threats. But the brain still responds by signaling the adrenal glands to release cortisol. “Those energy substrates are still in high circulation so you can run away,” Hasson says. “But if you don’t, or can’t, run away, you’re always in this high-alert situation, whether or not you’re conscious of it.”
.. As part of its role in freeing up energy, chronic exposure to cortisol also increases cravings for high-sugar, high-fat foods, and increases the body’s resistance to insulin, the hormone that signals the body’s cells to absorb sugar.
Instead of litigating affirmative action, simply hold a lottery for all qualified applicants.
In its simplest version, the process would work like this. The application would involve a checklist of more or less objective, externally verifiable criteria. These might include GPA above a certain cutoff, scores of 4 of 5 on a given number of AP tests, and so on. Extracurricular achievements could be considered. For example, there might be a box to be checked by applicants who played a varsity sport. The application could even ask about socio-economic status, allowing applicants to indicate that their parents had not attended college or that they grew up in a high-poverty census tract.
.. What about diversity? In the long run, the lottery would produce a student body proportional to the demographics of the applicant pool (which would not necessarily be the same as the general population). If universities aimed to enroll classes that more closely reflected the country as whole, they could encourage applications from underrepresented groups or regions and work with K-12 schools to increase the number of applicants who met the benchmarks. Such efforts would correspond to the original meaning of affirmative action and would not require invidious racial distinctions.
.. The lottery plan isn’t perfect. One concern is that alumni would hate it, since it would make snobbery about where they went to college harder to justify. This could reduce donations, forcing universities to make more prudent use of their existing resources.
More broadly, elite university universities might lose a bit of their cachet. They would still attract some of the world’s most brilliant students. But they could no longer claim that their careful selection of an exquisitely curated class gives them special moral authority.
Do Affinity Groups Create More Racial Tension on Campus?
Racial prejudice, in general, decreases with exposure to an ethnically diverse college environment, the report reveals. Students who were randomly assigned to a roommate of a different ethnicity developed more favorable attitudes toward students of different backgrounds, and the same associations held for friendship and dating patterns.
On the contrary, students who interacted mainly with others of similar backgrounds were more likely to exhibit bias toward others and perceive discrimination against their group.
“Ethnically oriented, student-based organizations such as the Afro-American Studies Association or the Latin American Student Association create more [racial] tension,” Sidanius says. “Once students joined these organizations, it increased their own ethnic identification and gave students the feeling that they were being ethnically victimized by other student groups.”
Empowering the Ugliness
The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.
But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.
Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican.
So along comes Donald Trump, saying bluntly the things establishment candidates try to convey in coded, deniable hints, and sounding as if he really means them. And he shoots to the top of the polls. Shocking, yes, but hardly surprising.