Professor Tanya Hernández was quoted in The Jersey Journal on the potential change in the admission policy of Jersey City’s top schools, warning against increased racial disparity in service of socioeconomic diversity.
The Board of Education approved a resolution Thursday at its monthly meeting to review how students are accepted at McNair Academic High School and the Infinity Institute, hoping to change the selection process from being based solely on race to a socioeconomic scale.
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Fordham University Law Professor Tanya Hernandez cautioned that Jersey City officials should examine if the current policy — roughly 25% each Black, white, Hispanic and “other” — is needs to be fixed.
While there are “disturbing” racial disparities in the nation’s “socioeconomic hierarchy,” when race is not part of the selection process “it’s poor white people who are exclusively targeted by socioeconomic programs.”
“Now I am not saying that is the case here, but if I were involved, I would want a lot more detail because oftentimes the conversation ‘oh we should be looking at socioeconomic diversity’ is the first step to dismantling any examination of issues of racial disparity,” Hernandez said. “Because of the preconceived notion that dealing with socioeconomic status is the same thing as dealing with race or because there is the bad view that race and class closely converge.
“When we had all kinds of interventions that have thought to work along socioeconomic lines, federal government programs that have sought to address the issue of socioeconomic inequality, the problem has been when race is not made part of the inquiry that it is poor white people who are exclusively targeted by those socioeconomic programs.”
Hernandez researches and teaches areas revolving around discrimination, including critical race theory and social justice reform at Fordham.