> Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.
This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct, that means that lower access to education and economic attainment among under represented people of color has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with...something. What is that thing? Why would it be the case that, as Philosopher Liam Bright says, "the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by"?
The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against (Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The main difference seems to be cultural values that prioritize the nuclear family and educational attainment. The SAT isn't racist, poor black people who study do far better than rich white people who don't.
If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the culture, family, and values you grew up with.
> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover, “[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” In other words, as the figure below indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.
The grandparent post literally linked to a write up about a Harvard study showing that a two parent family is the biggest predictor for economic mobility. Other studies have shown that time spent studying (not race, not household wealth) is the biggest predictor of SAT scores and thereby university admission.
Of course, this has been known for very long. Moynihan was getting in trouble for saying it back in the 60s. It's also the reason why the Civil Rights Act includes women; a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill (which was widely understood to be aimed at strengthening black fathers to keep families together) to get the whole thing killed (though some publications have argued that Smith was the Baptist rather than the bootlegger in the group that got women added to the bill). The bill was still destroyed by it, if not in the way originally pictured, since it passed.
>If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians.
Do you have a source for this? Not for debate, I'm genuinely wondering where the information comes from. From time to time I've heard things about people from Nigeria being hardworking - haven't looked into it very deep though.
Not a direct source but https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/yes-nigerian-... pops up as a fact check after the same claim was made by Candace Owens. This link (from 2018) refers to several reputable sources of the time. I would guess that there are updated data from the US Census Bureau et al if you want to double check, but from all sources linked it seems Nigeria is and has been on an upward swing as far as exporting educated, successful people to the U.S. (and perhaps retrieving them to prevent brain drain, but I cannot be sure).
FWIW and from anecdotal accounts of acquaintances of mine (not a lot but in the double digits), this comes down to a cultural focus on education and family structure from a young age. Compare to the culture and family values promulgated elsewhere.
> The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against. ...It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the culture, family, and values you grew up with.
This might actually be the best plausible argument in favor of affirmative action and D&I policies targeted towards these folks. By making it easier for them to enter especially high-skilled industry sectors such as tech we strengthen their incentive for adopting more effective cultural norms, which has significant benefits in the longer run.
(Unfortunately, this won't do any good if the educational system as a whole is not up to reasonable standards - if you're uneducated, you're still practically barred from the most productive and lucrative careers. And U.S. K-12 public education sucks.)
> that means that lower access to education and economic attainment
But you're not arguing that we give opportunities to people without good access to education and poor finances. You're arguing we give opportunity based off race. In fact, there are far more white people in the US with poor access to education. If you really wanted to increase opportunities for such people you wouldn't accomplish it by judging by race.
The beauty of it is that you don't have to figure out what the underlying mechanism is. You just need to help people on the basis of those measurable metrics - poverty, access to education etc - while ignoring other factors. If it so happens that those other factors have a causal correlation with poverty etc, well, you've just mitigated that.
No, it's not, What the GP said is true. as I responded to someone else, you really should study Thomas Sowell because he articulates this stuff better than anyone else. I would specifically recommend Black Rednecks and White Liberals for a discussion about negative cultural elements that trace back to rural areas of Scotland, Ireland, and England, were transplanted to the American south, and eventually transplanted to African americans, who themselves eventually migrated from the south for more opportunity. He also talk about how leftists exacerbate the problem.
Wealth, Poverty, and Poltics reads like a textbook, but provides a wealth of information about causes of disparity that have nothing to do with racism. Similarly, conquest and cultures talks a lot about disparate impact throughout history.
One of the foundational tenets of CRT is that all racial disparity is caused by systemic racism, and, therefore, that all racial disparity must be addressed by systemic change until there are equal outcomes. This idea is fundamentally wrong on a billion levels, and also insanely harmful to society. It is one of the main reasons, if not the primary reason, why CRT is so wrong and so dangerous. When you diagnose the illness so completely wrong, and then diagnose the cause of the alleged illness so completely wrong, then, your prognosis is not only going to fail to improve anything, it's going to make things worse for everyone!
Why should there be any one, single thing? Maybe it's the aggregate of a million small factors which don't add up to any compact story. That's not a terribly exciting hypothesis, and I don't have any great answers for what to do about it, but it seems a lot more plausible than the epicycles required to explain how overrepresented people of color and Indian CEOs are compatible with a white-led racial hierarchy.
Do Obama's daughters have lower access to education?
No.
So it's not about race. (I just gave you proof.)
It's about wealth and social class. Sure, those might correlate with race, and even be caused by racism (past or present), but virtually all real world consequences are downstream of wealth (in particular the ones mentioned: where you live, what you can afford, the amount of free time you have, your health, your nutrition, access to education/jobs, ...).
If you ignore wealth and focus on race, you're racist.
Has there ever been a poor person that has succeeded in our society? Of course. Therefore I proved money doesn't matter. (Do you see how stupid this argument is?)
I hate to have to say something this obvious but here it goes:
Discriminating against a group of human beings for an arbitrary detail such as the color of the skin is indeed racist. No matter if that human being is a freaking north-europe-blonde-arian-white or whatever. No matter if that human being is or not opressed or whatever. Judging people by the color of the skin is WRONG. This ideological bullshit that US is expelling that pretends to normalice racism against white people is atrocious and must end and everyone, like you, that follows this line of thought must be called out and being exposed as what you are, which is being a fucking racist.
Ok, so we distinguish between "good racism" and "bad racism" then? Absurd. Sorry but I do not make that distinction: racism is bad no matter what your ancestor did and it's despicable. Also, *stop* assuming that the whole world has the same historical context as the US.
I'm sorry but I simply don't buy those "scales of racism" of yours. Racism is bad, period.
> This is a thread about a US based company so assuming the historical context of the US matters is fair.
I was talking in general terms given that I've encountered this US ideological racist garbage in many places at this point.
> Also anti-black racism exists across the world.
Not at least where I'm originally from (Africa).
I cannot get my head around any of these arguments other than pure and simple indoctrination. As soon as you apply basic common sensical logical reasoning to it, you see how outrageous and ridiculous is.
Not a relief, but that difference means one is a more pressing issue than the other. In the same way someone with chest pains in the ER goes back before someone with non-critical respiratory issues.
In colloquial English, racism has the same meaning today that it did for decades before - a belief that humans' behavior depends on their race, and prejudice and/or discrimination stemming from such a belief.
The whole "prejudice + power" thing is a late social studies invention. Which is fine - different fields of study often have their own terminology, including using words in ways that do not directly match their regular meaning. What's not fine is people from those fields of study lecturing everyone else on how we're supposedly using it wrong. It's like biologists going around randomly yelling at people that tomatoes aren't vegetables whenever the subject comes up... except biologists don't do that.
Of course you can. And it's really easy, too. You simply discriminate against their race (or, as you have described, their skin color).
In case you haven't figured it out by now, if a human being can be lumped into a race, then racism can be levelled towards that person. That's literally baked into the meaning of the word racism.
I disagree; racism is racism regardless of the class situation of the target.
A small number of people have promoted the idea that if a class is not systematically oppressed, it can't be a target of racism, but that's wrong. It was picked up by the mainstream press and promoted as an idea for a while, but it's wrong.
Depends on the system in "systemic". I wouldn't dare argue too much about the U.S. but if you applied the same standards globally?... Well, "whites" aren't looking so oppressive on an individual scale, and on a national scale the "white" countries most oppressive aren't long for being viewed as "white" within a generation or two, regardless of how often "great replacement" conspiracy theories are debunked. See the ever-expanding definition of "white" in order to maintain the illusion.
LOL. You’re so upset at being schooled on your own history that all you have is a whataboutism. I hope you recognize that your response/reaction is pathetic and, importantly, absolutely tangential to the issue at hand. Ligma, l’il buddy.
You broke the site guidelines extremely, horribly, and repeatedly in this thread. If you do that again we will ban you. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
I actually banned you just now, but decided to undo it because the other user was also way over the line. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please respect the rules from now on.
If you ban me, could you also please ban the ignorant racist that kicked off this sub thread. And the one in the other thread. Thanks. Hate to see HN giving these guys a platform.
Your comments in this thread have broken the site guidelines shamefully. We ban accounts that post like this.
I would have banned the two of you, but I don't want to ban you without a warning and I'm not going to let you off the hook while banning the other person, so I'm going to let you both off the hook. However, please don't ever vandalize HN like this again.
Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.
> Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.
Yet there are more white people in poverty than black people in the US. If we are trying to give opportunity to impoverished people we would judge by poverty. If we want to live in a racist society then we would judge by race.
Why is that statistic even important to you? If it's about solving poverty then judge by how impoverished someone is, not their skin color.
But it also shouldn't be surprising. There are almost 6x as many white people in the US as black people. Poverty rates amongst white people is about half of black people. Do the math.
> There are almost 6x as many white people in the US as black people. Poverty rates amongst white people is about half of black people.
You've given the exact reason why your statement is a completely useless red herring. Say there was a minority in the U.S., the Romulans. Let's say literally every single Romulan in the U.S. was impoverished due to hundreds of years of systemic, intentional racism. But there's only, say, 500,000 of them. Half a million.
Your argument is "we shouldn't give more opportunities to the Romulans to counteract the very obvious and intentional systemic racism that put them in the shitty position they're in, because way more white people are in that shitty position. We should only focus on poverty, so that we help 36 white people for every 1 Romulan helped. Even though the Romulans are impoverished because of intentional, systemic racism. Even though their towns were literally bombed if they dared get too successful. Nope, we have to help 36 white people each time we help 1 Romulan." Do you see why that sounds racist?
You may be thinking of poverty rates or proportional percentages if you think the above is untrue. The data is there for you to manipulate for your purposes as you wish, though.
Reality isn't fighting against their argument as long as a single white or Asian poor person exists. It still means an approach is punching a part of the population further down.
These things aren't mutually exclusive, stop trying to project them as such.
But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism.
Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.
So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.