I had wondered about this through the lens of San Francisco's magnet school, Lowell. When I went to Lowell, it had numeric race based admission standards and there was a huge range. You needed a 67 if you were Chinese, 59 if you were White, 52 if you were Black or Latinx. This was affirmative action (and probably a rare case where White kids were receiving it).

I, of course, immediately want to tell you that I scored a 67 and would have gotten in no matter what. That's how strong the perception of being lesser is, even 30 years later while writing on a platform where I am the fucking CEO. Even then, there's still a part of me that wants to defend my admission.

Those differences in admission standards played out in success in the school. Honors math weeded people out and by the time you got to the hard AP Calculus, there were no black kids, only two white kids and everyone else was Chinese.

I've seen people point to this as a problem because the people who were let in with lower standards weren't catching up. But... I think there's also a deeper problem there. IMO, Lowell sucked as a school because it confused academic success with life success. I have so many friends, one with a perfect SAT score, others who were National Merit Finalists, who thought that hard work was the point of life and then had to make major life pivots in their 30s. One told me, "I had mastered extrinsic motivation, but it's not just that I wasn't connected to my intrinsic motivations, it's that I didn't even understand intrinsic motivation as a concept."

He told me that when he was 40 and it made me want to cry on his behalf. Here was one of the kindest, smartest, hardest working people I knew, someone I'd seen have a very interesting creativity streak, and he was just then starting to live his own life.

I don't have an exact answer here. I just think that every time I hear about affirmative action that it's so much bigger than representation and opportunity. It's a question of purpose. What are we trying to achieve? Why does anyone want to get into Harvard or whatever?