What's the deal with hair-touching?

How many DEI admits have gotten into the Ivy League with essays about white children touching their hair?

I never much noticed the pervasiveness of complaints from nonwhite essayists about white children having touched their hair at their expensive elementary school until I read Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

Obama went to Punahou School, the most famous private school in Hawaii, a state that had a very high rate of interracial marriage going back generations. That seems nice for the young Obama, but nobody buys memoirs to hear about how your childhood was, basically, fine. They want to hear about your oppression.

So, Obama delivered the goods:

A redheaded girl asked to touch my hair and seemed hurt when I refused.

Diversity of hair is pretty interesting to children — e.g., all those years later, Obama could remember that the would-be hair-toucher was a redhead.

Since Obama, the horror of childhood hair-touching has become a massive Thing in op-eds by diverse writers who went to prestigious colleges.

I would guess that it’s a useful anecdote to deliver in your college application essay, so they keep on using it, over and over, in their adult careers.

Why do colleges love to accept hair-touchees?

First, it says that you are visibly Diverse.

Granted, it’s not as if colleges care enough about applicants checking a dubious race/ethnicity box to ever do an audit (so far as I know, and I’ve been interested in the subject for a half century). But you’ve got to imagine that admissions staffers are mostly against whites and/or Asians outsmarting them by checking the wrong box.

Second, top colleges want their affirmative action admits to have gone to mostly white/Asian schools. Back in the 1970s, when quotas were new, Harvard naively let in a bunch of the brighter graduates of ghetto schools. But unfortunate incidents ensued.

Ever since, they’ve preferred affirmative action admits who have been pre-exposed to the kind of students who get into Harvard without affirmative action. So, hair-touching anecdotes confirm that you are privileged, which is what they want. Having an anecdote about the other kids wanting to touch your hair is evidence that you went to the right type of school.

Third, while the Bakke decision in 1978 asserted that affirmative action isn’t for reparations, but instead that colleges are doing it for the good of white students by making classrooms discussions so much more intellectually scintillating, admissions staffers probably really do want it to be reparations. So, they like to hear what they are exacting vengeance for: e.g., Obama becoming President is thus rightful vengeance on that little redheaded girl.