What about racial quotas?

It is a consensus that we live in an era of racial discrimination. I’m not here trying to clarify that. I’m here to share some ideas related to affirmative actions. Knowing that I understand the reality of racism and its more destructive young brother, structural racism, let’s start.

I’ve been thinking about bringing my ideas to debate, and until now, I didn’t discover how to do it properly. It’s a complex theme and challenging to write. It would be a lot easier talking face to face.

First of all, I would like to point out that I always smell a rat about giving someone an advantage because of an innate characteristic. However, a feature that can improve can receive attention and nudges to change.

Second, when we give someone an incentive/advantage based on an innate characteristic, this incentive/advantage will not go away when they overcome the “disadvantages”. How long will it last? Will we be able to correctly judge when it’s time to finish the governmental measures?

Let’s bring to this discussion a few ideas in the physics spectrum.

According to Newton, we have three mechanical laws, but I will use only two to complement this argument:

Law of inertia: Through this idea, we can understand that we need to do something. Let the things the way it is is not going to be healthy for our society.

F=m*a: When we apply a force on an object, this object will only stop because of a counterforce. If the idea is to help someone overcome something, where is the friction after the incentives?

And now I come with my point. What if we are having the wrong decisions when thinking about affirmative actions? For some years, I’ve been thinking about the best incentives to societies, and I realize that the best incentives fit in every society. Suppose we have a community where the greens have privileges under the oranges. If we implement a law that says that blacks have some incentives, it will not fit. This law would be suitable only for societies with black and other colors. I believe that fair laws serve different communities.

What kind of force in physics helps an object move from the point of disadvantage to the center point (our "perfect point") and the other from the advantage point to the center point? GRAVITY!

And how can we change all kinds of forces to gravity when we talk about nudges?

We have to focus on characteristics that can change, like social class.

When you achieve your new characteristic like a wealth percentile, you lose the incentives, and someone that now are having problems will receive them. That is the fairest incentive, a flexible incentive.

So let’s get back to affirmative actions.

When we define a percentage of individuals in a university for each color, I will be successful in the short term. Knowing that blacks are the majority in the lowest classes, this law will work even wrongly, and that’s why we should debate more about this. In the long term, we encourage people to treat each other differently depending on natural features, which doesn’t seem right. The law can treat no one based on fixed characteristics. I’m afraid that we look it good because it improves something in the short term, but the right is giving equal rights to all always.

So what to do?

Given that black people are the majority in the country’s poorest, we should give incentives to the poor. With that, we do not treat them differently under the law, and at the same time, we change their reality, bringing them to environments that they deserve to be part of, and we start to change the status quo.

What about places that there are no blacks, like in a corporate board of directors or other positions that are higher in the corporate hierarchy?

That’s more difficult to answer. How can we create a force that acts like gravity and can help us with diversity? We will have to debate and make different ideas for doing this. Here is one that I thought:

If diversity is something important, why shouldn’t we have introduction lectures about opportunities of courses/experiences that can help others ladder the company hierarchy after debates designed to talk about diversity and structural problems? When we do this, we are nudging the environment that allows ascension within the company between those that are more likely to be interested in diversity. And who do you think will be more interested in diversity themes? The privileged one or the one that suffers from some structural problem?