Now say you have a black guy—not Justyce, but someone else—whose single parent’s income falls beneath the poverty line. He lives in a really crummy area and goes to a public school that has fifteen-year-old textbooks and no computers. Most of the teachers are fresh out of college and leave after a year. Some psychological testing has been done at this school, and the majority of students there, this guy included, are found to suffer from low self-esteem and struggle with standardized testing because of stereotype threat—basically, the guy knows people expect him to underperform, which triggers severe test anxiety that causes him to underperform.

[…]

Now erase the two backgrounds. We’ll keep it simple and say GPA-wise, you have a four-point-oh and he has a three-point-six. Test scores, you got a fifteen-eighty, right? Well, this guy got an eleven-twenty. Based on GPA and scores only, which one of you is more likely to get into a good college?