The Valley is so disconnected from the "real" America. I hate using that term, but to anyone that's lived in more rural non-coastal areas will quickly realize that the issue is not racism or sexism (although these do play a part). Rather, it's a purely economic stratification. I'm a 1.5-generation American (moved here when I was 11) and attended HS in Georgia at a mediocre high school -- underfunded, understaffed, etc. Our valedictorian is the only one from my graduating class that went to an Ivy League school (and he could "only" manage to get accepted by Cornell). Just about everyone else went to a local school: either UGA (barely breaks the top-50), GSU (terribly ranked, like top-200; I went here my freshman year), or GA Tech (which was extremely competitive and hard to get into). Compare this to my sister's high school (which she graduated from after my family and I moved to Southern California): about 20% attended Ivy League schools, and a significant portion attended highly-ranked California institutions: Stanford, CalTech, UCLA, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, etc.
It's hard to argue that these Californian students were that much smarter than my Georgia cohort, and yet fate threw these two different sets of youngsters on widely different life trajectories. Race, gender, religion all play a role -- but more importantly, it's economic segregation we need to watch out for.
I'm from the bottom of the barrel, socio-economically speaking. But I'm white and male, and I can point to multiple moments in my life where people gave me the benefit of the doubt and I honestly do not believe they would have done so if I didn't pattern match for them to "nerdy white boy, probably really smart."
Of course I had to take advantage of those opportunities, but I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have even been on offer to people who didn't have my racial/gender advantages.
How much of this is just selection bias? I’m a white male who probably pattern matches the same way. A few months ago I was traveling and as a completely innocent mistake forgot to pay rent by a day. I was not given the benefit of the doubt at all — I was blocked from online payments and was given three days to vacate before a formal eviction suit would be filed against me, as if I were a criminal who couldn’t have just had a momentary lapse. The notice was unconditional, meaning the landlord could choose to continue eviction proceedings even if I paid — the most extreme option available to them, usually reserved for someone they want out no matter what.
In this case, I went in the next morning with a cashier’s check and they dropped it. But moments like this have led me to wonder if the common narrative of privilege actually applies to me in practice as much as is assumed.
I am a sample of one. And I've had a few bad experiences too, sometimes involving things like late payment (in my case because I was genuinely unable to pay). I've noticed a bit of a pattern: your landlord could be sued for discrimination if someone could show a pattern of enforcing the rules on protected individuals and not on others. If a paper trail is being created, it's not surprising to find that rules are rules. But as an example, I was homeless at one point and should have been arrested for shop-lifting (food) and the cop gave me a break. If I'd been black in that part of the city, I guarantee I would have been in jail. In other cases, I've had multiple examples of people listening to me and not listening to more-qualified women in the same meeting, often if I simply repeat what they said 30s later.
It can go both ways. I am being stalked and experiencing a pattern of targeted harassment, assault (both attempted and succeeded) and other crime. It's left me in dire straits.
I just recently saw on the news a woman talking about this happening to women, saying: "women experience harassment and assault and are unable to continue their careers and have been driven from their homes."
While that's exactly what has happened to me, I dont find any advocates. Especially on the news. In fact, people assume these things cant happen to white, nerdy guys.
It's really overwhelming. It must have obviously been even more hopeless for people when these kinds of things happened to people within a society of not just targeted hate, but institutionalized prejudice as well. It's good that's changed for the better for those people.
But here I am and I'm not really sure what the best way to get help is.
Please consult with authorities and record all instances of stalking/harassment. Protect yourself by all legal means possible and educate yourself on self defense strategies that can protect your life and keep you out of jail.
Post on the subreddit r/legaladvice for some actionable advice.
Sorry you are going through this, I hope our justice system can help you.
If anyone has connections to media or any civil rights groups and is interested in my story I will add a way to contact me in my profile.
I had to move across the world and a couple weeks after arrival, people started telling me there was a man who was claiming to be my father that was looking for me (his description was very far from my father's).
That was not an isolated incident. There's a very long list of unjust and crazy things happening to me.
Everyone asks, what would be the motive? This is why for so long I didnt recognize this was happening to me. Because there was no rational reason for it to.
It's hard to explain, but starting when I was a minor, I experienced a series of outrageous injustices from wealthy individuals. I think the motives developed out of these liabilities and it grew from there into a collection of people, ideas, and institutions which had wronged me. I'm guessing.
Some events may be entirely unrelated to each other. But even a literal nazi like Richard Spencer went, what, years before someone punched him? It would be extroardinarily strange that without motive or liability for anyone to have this much obsession with what a normal person.
I dont have many friends and most people dont want to associate with Thomas Paines, let alone someone with lifetime bullying problems without even an apparent virtuous cause or source of prejudice. And unfortunately, a lot of people are inclined to think that if such negativity afflicts you then you must have done something to deserve it.
Once I started publishing my self-recordings of aggresses the attacks basically went from common occurences to zero. Suggesting some orchestration, or an extroardinary coincidence.
I'm fearful of seeking help because it could potentially instigate an escalated retaliatory response.
What else to do? Living my life on the run is obviously just a dead end. I'm lucky to have the physical and mental capability to survive thus far both physically and financially, but in both senses I'm already pushing the limits.
Please post your story on the subreddit r/legaladvice for some actionable advice.
www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice
There are legal professionals there that will anonymously give you their advice on what to do to better your situation. If you want to be private, post from a public place like Starbucks.
Probably people who don't believe men can experience these things allied with people who believe men can experience them but see it as un-manning them. Humans are weird.
It avoids the rabid anti-feminism of way too many male-centric spaces, while also avoiding the de-centering of men that tends to happen in more moderate spaces (remember The Good Men Project?).
Not knowing where you are, but generally it is difficult to evict people. They are probably using scare tactics to get you to pay. I find it unlikely they would be able to evict you for paying a day late.
Unless you know the landlord personally, I'm sure this was all just automatic, and it quotient matter who you were, they would have done the same thing
Many landlording books and courses recommend posting the 3-day notice-to-quit immediately when the rent is due. It's probably 10-20% asserting/protecting the landlord's rights under the law and 80-90% "training the tenants to hold up their end of the contract as they signed it."
Wouldn't it be more normal to post a "pay or quit" notice? The significance of this is the landlord is legally obligated to drop eviction proceedings if you pay within 3 days. I don't think jumping straight to an unconditional notice to quit is normal or even legal in many states. Indeed, many states require repeated violations before a landlord is allowed to post an unconditional notice: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-laws-unconditi...
I happen to be in Texas where any degree of nonpayment of rent, no matter how minor, innocent, or unintentional, can be used to justify an unconditional notice. But a "pay or quit" notice would have still been a less aggressive option available to them that would have achieved the same goal unless they had some ulterior motive (e.g., decide whether to proceed based on my skin color when I walked into the office with the cashier's check).
It is commonly understood in property management that you absolutely cannot appear to give breaks on paying the rent late, otherwise your tenants will prioritize making their car payment, cell phone payment, credit card payment, etc before paying rent. Obviously, if you have a long term renter who has always shown responsibility in the past, property managers will make exceptions.
My grandparents-in-law used to be slum lords and this was absolutely their policy. It can take a very long time to evict someone, so you immediately begin the proceedings in case they actually don’t end up paying.
So you've now experienced something that lots of people who don't look like you experience far more than you do. The fact that you had a bad thing happen to you once doesn't mean you aren't privileged in 99% of your interactions.
"...usually reserved for someone they want out no matter what."
And I'd suggest they make the decision when you arrive in person. Before that, I read your anecdote as having taken place all online without in-person contact. I'd further surmise that the entire process was automated.
The wrong person walks in that following day with the same cashier's check and it's 'thanks for the payment, we're proceeding with the eviction.'
It’s possible, but where’s the evidence of that? It sort of seems like you’re trying to suggest my experience doesn’t “count” because it could have been even worse. Is the above really what most people picture when they hear “white privilege”? I don’t think it is. To be clear I’m not questioning the existence of white privilege, but rather its magnitude or extent.
This wasn’t automated, at least not entirely — the notice was signed and hand delivered to my partner at home while I was at work, who then almost cried thinking we were going to be kicked out.
Asking for proof of white privilege in a single instance where we don't have all the facts is to misunderstand the topic.
Shitty things happen to people all the time. But for historical reasons, they happen at different rates to different groups of people. That's how our country started; e.g., only well-off white men could vote. We are slowly reducing that. Maybe in another hundred years we'll have it all sorted.
Your experience counts because it's your experience. But it doesn't say beans about privilege as a system. Your attitude, does, though. You're shocked and angry that a minor slip-up might end up with you out on the street. That's great! You're correct that it's unjust. But there are an awful lot of people for whom that isn't a surprise at all. They expect injustice, because they have experienced a lot more of it.
> Your experience counts because it's your experience. But it doesn't say beans about privilege as a system. Your attitude, does, though. You're shocked and angry that a minor slip-up might end up with you out on the street. That's great! You're correct that it's unjust. But there are an awful lot of people for whom that isn't a surprise at all
So if I as a non-white minority would have a similar reaction as the person you're responding to, in a similar situation, does that mean I'd have "white privilege" as well, because of my "attitude"? If you were tying this explanation strictly to economic status I would understand (even though I myself come from a low economic status anyway), but I cannot fathom what this has to do with race. Defining a psychological response as some kind of racial trait like that almost makes it sound like you're implying that I can't/shouldn't empathize with white people when they get dealt a raw deal, which is such a dehumanizing notion I don't even have words to describe it. Nevermind the other implication that I'm apparently expected to have low expectations and all kinds of troubles just because I'm a minority. But then again, I'd still have that "attitude" of a 'privileged' white person, so maybe that's the loophole that lets me have higher standards?
Back in my home country, everyone knew these sorts of disparities were due to money, nepotism, and/or corruption. But here in America where everyone's much better educated, it seems like everything gets tied to race somehow, as if correlation == causation. Like it wouldn't even surprise me at this point to wake up one morning and suddenly be informed that I'm eating a "white" brand of breakfast cereal, and that I should opt to have more 'racially appropriate' meals. My home country has many flaws, but I've certainly grown to appreciate it's simplicity and lack of convoluted social dynamics the longer I've lived here.
If you are a non-white person, no, I would not say you have had your expectations set by experiencing white privilege.
You are welcome to empathize with white people. I often do. I am one. I empathize with that guy. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge privilege.
If you can't fathom what this has to do with race, I'd suggest you haven't studied the topic enough. There is an ocean of history and rivers of current evidence that in America race drives a lot of this.
For example, you could go read Loewen's Sundown Towns, [1] which demonstrates that America had a major period of violent ethnic cleansing circa 1890-1930 known as the Nadir. That peaked with white people destroying America's most prosperous black district, firebombing it from the air and burning 35 blocks to the ground. [2]
You could go back from there and read about slavery and the civil war. You could read the various declarations of secession, where white people make clear they're willing to go to war because they believe black people are so inferior that they must forever be property. You could read the reports of the Freedmen's Bureau, and how even after the civil war there was endless violent aggression against black people.
Or you could go forward from the Nadir and read about Jim Crow. About white flight. About redlining. About racial exclusion covenants. Heck, right here in the Bay Area after WW II there was public debate over whether the peninsula should be declared whites only in its entirety.
From there you might read about the present. There too there's a ton of material. E.g., the classic resume study showing discrimination against black people. [3] And there are plenty of evocative books. E.g., Julie Lythcott-Haims's memoir Real American about growing up biracial. [4] Or Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race. [5] And I don't think an understanding of American racial dynamics is complete without a look at white fragility. DiAngelo recently did a talk about her excellent book that's a good intro. [6]
I agree that America could be unique in the extent to which race matters historically and currently. But it's not like other countries don't have major issues with racial discrimination. Wikipedia has a very long list of ethnic cleansing campaigns, for example. [7] Congrats if your home country never had any of that, but that's not where you are now.
I also get why you might think discrimination was due to some correlative factor, like money. I used to think that too. But over time I came around. What changed was studying the history, looking at the evidence, and really listening to non-white people with empathy and an open mind.
> If you can't fathom what this has to do with race, I'd suggest you haven't studied the topic enough
Unfortunately I have studied it a fair amount, and I still don't see it. What I do see is a lot of opinionated history pieces (because history is written by the victors), prompting white people to harbor a lot of needless guilt and negativity towards themselves over the actions of their ancestors as if they were personally responsible somehow, or as if nothing about the culture has changed since then. I certainly don't feel indebted to the world in $CURRENT_YEAR because of violence and warfare my indigenous tribal ancestors committed ages ago, because times change and people change.
It's one thing to remember history, but it's a whole other thing to continually reenact it in an endless loop as if the questionable actors of the past were still alive today. I see no better way for this country to end up having Jim Crow Laws 2.0, than by continuing to reduce everyone to their racial identities in a way that people find "socially acceptable". If most of the people in power begin to view whites as less than [other types of] human, it will only be a matter of time before such sentiments get established into law (again), and that's a scary road to go down. Instead of using history as a means of learning about past mistakes to avoid, I see people using it like a kind of bible/handbook which they use to justify repetitive traditions. And instead of aiming towards a harmonious future of forgiveness, I see everyone scrambling to further their own myopic interests and building a divisive future.
> What changed was studying the history, looking at the evidence, and really listening to non-white people with empathy and an open mind.
Humans, unfortunately, have the tendency to reliably find evidence for whatever beliefs they orient their minds to, so that's neither here nor there. In the words of C. G. Jung: "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people." So anything that isn't a hard science or mathematics might as well be a theological discussion that that point.
I would also wager that many of the non-white people you've spoken to are probably culturally American/Western as well, which would naturally predispose them to similar ideas anyway. Not that this would be your fault in any way, as simply speaking English already brings a lot of selection bias into play. But in my own personal dealings with people who were still culturally rooted in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and even some from parts of northern/eastern Africa, none of them shared this peculiar Western outlook that an entire race should somehow be expected to atone for their sins indefinitely.
You suggest I immerse myself in the minutia of Amrican political history to reach enlightenment, but my concern is a much more global and philosophical one, that likely won't be answered by mere history books. Also, being lectured about the utmost importance of American history after living in the country for decades doesn't help the stereotype that Americans are self-centered and oblivious about anything beyond their borders. Not that I'm one to buy into stereotypes, but this trope of ignoring the forest for the American trees is fairly common in my experience.
If you have studied America's history of race, you give very little indication.
You then shift your objection to modern activism. I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods. Since offering you resources on the previous topic didn't seem to prompt much but a change of topic, so I won't bother here.
I suggested you immerse yourself in America's history and present of race to understand America's present situation because you said you couldn't fathom that situation. That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will. Your choice, of course, but you shouldn't expect anybody to take your wilful ignorance as somehow meaningful.
I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.
> I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods.
I once again very well might be, but I should highlight the fact that "good intentions" alone are not enough to produce beneficial results, and my statements about peoples' aims were to reflect the mismatch between many of these peoples' intentions and the practical outcomes of their actions.
I recommend looking into the work of Paul Bloom to see the arguments for why such endeavors tend not to work out, and to get an idea of the possible implications of relying too heavily on methods/ideologies whose central goals tend to revolve around empathy and good intentions.
> That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will.
It could be that, or it could be that I simply disagree philosophically with the entire premise, and opt instead to take a broader scale look at the dynamics involved. Surely you can acknowledge that would lead to the same outcome, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference without looking for it; just as surely as you wouldn't be able to immediately deduce the cause of a fire simply from observing the fact that something is on fire.
If these theories were simply lenses for literary analyses of history that resulted in something akin to movie reviews, then it wouldn't be a big problem, but people like yourself seem to be holding up these philosophically unsound theories as "truths". And all this simply because these ideas are promoted by academics, despite them originating from questionable fields of social science that have suffered the most from the ongoing replication crisis and publication bias. Racial politics have always been justified by "credible" sources in the past, whether it be from biologists or theologians, so I don't see why modern sociologists would be any different.
There's a relevant saying that goes "the map is not the territory", and it implies that there are serious consequences when you start believing that your map is literally an accurate description of reality. Similarly, the saying "all models suck, but some are more useful than others" also applies here, except I'm failing to see the use of this particular model of 'white fragility' and the 'progressive stack', because if anything, it seems to have mostly served to drive racial tensions in this country to an all-time high, and most of it only within the last decade.
If we start finding "white fragility" an acceptable concept, what's to stop anyone from claiming "black/hispanic/asian/etc fragility" later? The problem is that the whole idea is founded upon things that aren't philosophically rigorous enough to prevent it from devolving into a slippery slope, and history has shown that murphy's law is very applicable in these cases. For example, what if I were to frame what's happening here as you "whitesplaining" to an oppressed minority, and that in reality you just can't handle the idea of being wrong because of your own "white fragility"? Would that not simply foment strong feelings of resentment in you, because it implies that you're simply belittling my views because you unconsciously view me as being part of an inferior race? If everything else I've read here goes, I'd think that interpretation would actually be perfectly valid. And if that pattern happened enough times, soon enough my own race would be labeled as "fragile", because that would be a perfectly natural human response to feeling attacked. Luckily, I don't feel inclined to label you a racist here, but realize that this is a power that's completely and arbitrarily under my control, and has been granted to me in this country simply because of the way I was born.
> I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.
I watched the talk you linked from her originally, and I found it completely lacking in rigorous explanations. I'm a personality psychology researcher myself, so from my perspective, the whole argument hand-waves away too many individual psychological phenomena/dynamics (actually, worse, she doesn't even cite/reference any to build up her theory), and doesn't seem to propose any falsifiable claims, nor did it even seem to make any cases for its explanatory power at all either. It rather reminded me a lot of astrology: a lot of speculation and projection of ambiguous grand theories onto observable entities, to "explain"/predict various mysterious phenomena in the world. Instead of elaborating about why or how the worldview is derived, she just plainly asserted "this is how the world works" with no justification or possible alternative explanations whatsoever. If that kind of research doesn't scream "replication crisis", I'm not sure what does. As a "scientist of color", this strikes me as pure pseudoscience.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that she seemingly can't help but speak for the views of us "people of color" in completely warped terms. Not everyone that isn't white thinks about (or wants to think about) white people in racial terms, nor attribute all their flaws to their skin color. She literally promotes viewing minorities as harboring resentment, and prejudiced, bigoted thoughts, like it's just our natural state because we're non-white, as if it's some kind of casual fact. Yet she simultaneously claims to "not speak for all of humanity". That is incredibly disgusting.
I'll check out her book anyway, if only to try and understand it the same way I tried to understand Mein Kampf, but my expectations are even lower now after having watched that talk.
It could be all sorts of things. But given your absurdly voluble dodging of points, and give that you're now on to "the anti-racists are the real Nazis", I think stick with my previous understanding.
A particularly striking example is around perceptions of wealth. In asking about wealth, they ask how much the average black household has if for every $100 the average white household has. The average answer was $85; the reality, $5.
It's easy to think white privilege doesn't exist if one focuses, as here, only on the white experience. But both currently and historically, there are huge differences that aren't much talked about. For those up for a read, I recommend Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
> A particularly striking example is around perceptions of wealth. In asking about wealth, they ask how much the average black household has if for every $100 the average white household has. The average answer was $85; the reality, $5.
I don't think this was for the average wealth, but for the richest 20%, by race.
The survey question from the study: “For every $100 in wealth accumulated by an average White family, how much wealth has the average Black family accumulated in 1983/2010?”
The problem I have with the narrative you advance is that you, like so many others I've seen in the past few years, seem to just ignore the existence of poor white people. This country has entire towns and cities of poor white people who are facing the same sorts of situations I described, but you make statements that suggest that it's only nonwhite people who experience this sort of thing regularly. Do you think harsh treatment from a landlord would have been a surprise to all the white people I grew up around as a kid who were on food stamps living in rented trailers? These folks had to move around every few years because they got kicked out or couldn't make rent. A sympathetic landlord would have been the surprise to them.
This is exactly the viewpoint I was trying to deconstruct with my original story -- that having all the white privilege in the world does not stop these things from happening to you, no matter what the narrative is, and that these experiences are simply not exclusive in any way to nonwhite people. You are either unaware of a huge demographic of people in the US, or you willingly ignore their presence.
None of this is to say that white privilege just flat-out doesn't exist, but it does explain why your manner of discussing it is highly unlikely to connect with white people who have regularly experienced all the things you seem to suggest only happen to minorities with high frequency. You appear to be discussing an alternate reality that does not exist for them.
FWIW, the same thing happened to me (had been paying consistently on time for two years and forgot to pay before going on a short vacation). It's just a standard practice thing for landlords to do for a variety of reasons, especially in places where it's difficult to evict people.
I don’t really follow. You just have to go to your bank to get a cashier’s check. I couldn’t even do that when I first got the notice, which is why I had to pay another day late. I was lucky in that I didn’t work the next day, so I was able to go in the morning.
How hard is it to get a cashiers check? Can you prove the threat of eviction is not also recinded when someone non-white-male pays the rent? If you don’t have the money, obviously that’s harder, but do we have any data that non-white-males who pay the rent a day late get evicted more frequently than others? Landlords don’t care about any color other than on-time-green.
> Landlords don’t care about any color other than on-time-green.
This is obviously not a universal truth (and there have been many well-known cases of individual and systemic housing discrimination in the USA). Here's a Wikipedia bit that has more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_(United...
I used to be really active online on some programming forums. After years on those sites, some of us posted photos of ourselves.
Apparently people thought all the well spoken nerdy types were all skinny and pale. I was brown with hairy arms. Another guy was black with a heavy sheriff mustache.
Everyone seemed to find it really surprising, which I guess makes me wonder how deep stereotypes cut.
Same story. I’m from a rural area in the South. Attended a terrible high school. No one in my small graduating class attended an elite university. Most attended universities ranked outside the top 100. I only know of a few graduates from my high school that attended the flagship state school ranked in the top 30-40, but they were exceptions.
No one in the history of my high school attended an Ivy League school.
Those in the more well-funded areas of the state send a large percentage of their graduates to Ivy League institutions on a yearly basis.
The smartest people from my high school weren’t that different intelligence wise from those more well-funded high school graduates.
The difference is our school offered a limited number of upper division college ready classes and had terrible teachers.
I think the assumption in my high school were students would graduate and go into a trade. Not many were expected to do anything big in college.
Did those students simply not have any initiative? It's sad to see such a reliance on others. I'm also from the rural South from a high school where most of my classmates stayed within the same small town, but I took initiative and got accepted to MIT and other top universities.
This is a cute argument, but I don't think you can successfully counter "No one in the history of my high school attended an Ivy League school" where California (and Massachusetts, and Connecticut) high schools routinely send 10%+ of their graduating classes to Ivy League institutions.
Your claim is cute that high schools "send" their graduates to Ivy League schools. It denigrates their efforts. They applied, and they earned admission.
The smartest people from my high school went to the flagship state school. The State school was essentially the ceiling of where our high school graduates went.
High school graduates from my school were simply not competitive (on paper) against the students applying to elite institutions.
One student had scored a 1600 out of a 1600 on their SAT, but was denied admissions to one of the ivies. They instead went to one of our state schools.
My high school is quite terrible and I don’t think any parent that has money would send their children to such places.
As mentioned, in the more well-funded schools, they regularly send their graduates to the most elite colleges including HYPS.
The ability level between the smartest person from high school and the students graduating from the well-funded high school isn’t anything huge. They’re probably of equal ability, yet one sends their graduates to elite places and the other doesn’t.
Couldn't one ask then, if the problem isn't (only) with schools (American schools, unlike its colleges, are generally unimpressive, including California ones, really) but with elite colleges as well? It's no secret already that they are choosing students for "culture fit" (e.g. see the Harvard lawsuit), so could it be possible that they just don't want "them hicks" regardless of how well-prepared they might have been?
In my city, there’s one Ivy League “feeder” school, it’s a private school that’s $20,000 a year or so for tuition. I went to a public school and also knew a guy who got a 1600 on his SAT, but couldn’t get accepted to Ivy League.
In 2017, only 5 kids got accepted to Ivy League schools in the best private school where I live, out of 100 or so in the graduating class? I’m not sure what that means, but maybe it’ll be of interest to someone.
Right, I have no idea, I’m simply saying that in terms of opportunities in a midwestern metropolitan with 1-2 million people, even what’s considered the best schooling option at any price has very few Ivy League bound students.
Well, one of SV's founders (and YC graduate at that) said that Middle America is a shithole full of stupid people. With the donations from, and revolving door between Ivies and SV elite (I guess Wall Street as well, but people there tend to be a bit more practical), why would either want to admit those stupid people from those shithole places into their rarefied circles?
It's more or less no opportunity for initiative. If most of the time you see others going into the state university system and think that the top universities are out of your range you most likely never gain that initiative. At least until later in life or at all even. The reliance comes from people who would usually give you advice are out of their element.
I grew up in a very rural area and we had a similar ceiling. State schools for the top 5% of students, community college for the next 20%, and farming for the rest. I did well in high school and I applied to a few high caliber schools and was not accepted. I think you have it right, I had no perception of what the bar for entry at elite schools was or how to get there because not a single person within 100 miles had ever attended one.
I don't think you're blaming them for not getting into any, but I still want to say that i think one can't expect such an initiaitive from (essentially) childen. Taking initiaitve is also very character-dependend, I know some very smart and able, but shy people. They wouldn't really try something like this, they just don't have the courage.
It's a remarkable archievement to get into top universities on your own, but I don't think the skill (i don't mean your archievements in high-school, but doing this on your own) correlates too well the academic ability.
I think a realiance on others/your enviroment is just not something that you can change, especially during your young years.
A big part of that is the result of choices that Californians have made. We choose to be a high tax state, and we chose to invest heavily in higher education via the UC and CSU system. This has paid off, and California is reaping the benefits of a highly educated workforce.
I feel bad for Georgians, but they have chosen to have lower taxes and fewer services.
Don’t forget our community colleges, which are perhaps even more impactful. Even an average student can go to school and later transfer to a CSU or a UC. Beyond a standard 4 year degree, they also help with getting younger students ahead and older ones continuing their education.
Of course! My mom was a transfer director at a community college for many years... I saw how many people transformed their lives through community college.
It's not clear how the parent post blames this on "economic stratification" when siblings in highschool have the same economic status because of their parents.
His sister just went to a different better school.
Economic stratification is not simply a natural phenomenon. Especially at the current global levels of inequality. Policies and institutions had to be built to create and sustain this level of inequality. I'm not surprised that California in your opinion has done a better job of providing opportunities for it's high schoolers to get a better education compared to Georgia. For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does.
> For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does.
I'm not sure I'd blame the state. It's pretty obvious that admissions committees don't take socioeconomic factors in mind. Some states are always going to be wealthier than others -- that's just a fact of life -- but why are universities punishing (poor) students by culling opportunity? After all, a poor black kid has more in common with a poor white kid than a black one-per-center.
The parent is praising California not because of their superior admissions policies, but due to the sheer number of Universities and opportunities available to students in California because of the State investing in education/Universities.
I would assume a lot of that is due to California's initiative process allowing its residents to put more school bonds on ballots, both locally and statewide. Georgia's initiative process only allows amendments and repeals for existing laws, and only for cities and counties.
Indeed economic stratification like that is profoundly unnatural. What’s natural is either universal poverty, if you look at the world before ~5,000 years ago, or nigh on universal poverty, if you look at the world before modern economic growth began in the -1800’s. There were places and periods that were better off before that but it never lasted. The population increased until the average person was on the brink of starvation and every 5-20 years over 10% of the population would die in a famine. And there was always a small class of patricians or tradespeople and an even smaller oligarchy or aristocracy who thought themselves rich but had no medicine worth the name, lived by candlelight when it was dark and travelled by horse, cart or ship.
You’re quite right that economic stratification is not a natural phenomenon. Economic growth is profoundly unnatural. In nature we’re a slightly more successful kind of ape.
The true story of civilization was the story increasing carrying capacity, so population needn't be managed through warfare, famine or infanticide. Which through contraception, TV and the internet has now become a different story of population management.
It wouldn't look the same, but I suspect economic stratification would still happen even without the institutions that reinforce it, because small advantages compound and power laws are a thing.
I'm reminded of how scientists have elaborate protocols for eliminating bias in experiments, because just wanting to do it right isn't enough. Fairness (however you define it) doesn't happen by default.
Understanding power law distributions is a real eye opener. They're everywhere in nature.
I don't know about how other people feel, but after learning about power law distributions and then seeing them everywhere I now just think "well, thats just how nature works." That and the normal distribution.
I often meditate on people's obsession over fairness. The best I can come up with is that it is a hardball negotiating tactic to get more than you otherwise would through creating leverage by making others feeling uncomfortable and betting that they're not going to be able to tolerate the uncomfortable state. That comes from watching both Frans De Waal's Capuchin monkey experiment below and from observing my toddler.
Then you consider all of the power Laws in the universe. Almost nothing is fair. Unfairness seems to be the default. Consider the animal kingdom is full of homicidal behavior. Life is very rough. Yet we expect "everything should be fair and everyone should be nice." At some level that just isn't commensurate with reality.
I also find there is an extreme intolerance, at least if feels that way to me, maybe it's just an extreme frustration, of inefficiencies in nature. An article pointing out that some talent is being underutilized and this is a travesty! Ok, I'm in agreement it would be nice if it could be maximized, I guess. But I think it's ludicrous to expect a system that has optimize for the whole to optimize for local cases too. Imagine you have to design a system that can handle anything and work well enough under almost any circumstance. That necessarily requires some trade-offs that have kind of crappy results in a variety of conditions. The best way I have come up with describing it is "constraint-based optimization is the root of all evil"
Partly. Though where did the parents and schools learn it from? Arguably Marxist and Postmodern philosophy. But where did those philosophers get it from? We know from Frans De Waal's research (original paper linked below) that the concept of fairness is present in non-human primates. He mentions in his TED talk that the experiment has also been replicated in other animals, though I haven't confirmed that.
Well, yes, and to go further, most of the famous philosophers had things to say about justice, and so do most religions. (So why single out Marxism and and Postmodernism?)
Do any of them say "power laws, what can you do?" That seems like confusing what is and what ought to be.
Only because they're some of the most recent philosophies that have had a very widespread impact and also due to them emphasizing Collectivism as opposed to Individualism. Postmodernism is born out of Marxism and Marxism pushes the equality theme hence fairness. I'd say that's a fairly valid reason to cite them?
Matthew 13:12 "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."
One could take that to be in reference to the general dynamics of power laws.
But, to reiterate my actual point, you find the same behavior related to 'fairness' in the animal kingdom, so it's not a uniquely human thing. That also makes Marx and Postmodernism irrelevant. They're almost a natural consequence that arises from some deeper, pre-existing thing.
The Is-Ought problem is relevant. If we accept that the distribution of power in society and the distribution of individual contribution follow power laws (they certainly seem to) then in response to "what is" as a society we have to make a decision about "what ought to be" in terms of how we run our society. You have to make that choice but the David Hume points out with his Is-Ought problem that you cannot link the morality of what you think "ought to be" with what is.
This means that whether Marx is saying well it seems that Capitalism has some problems that eventually result in it eating itself with all this power and wealth going to the top, the middle being stripped out and the rest winding up dirt poor on the bottom, so we "ought" not to do things that way OR You say something along the lines of supporting the current capatilist paradigm, you can't compute whether or not you are making the "right" choice from a moral standpoint in either case.
My line of thinking for what "ought" to be is that if nature really does seem hell bent on organizing things a certain way, how likely is it we can do anything about that? And if going against the grain seems to produce perverse results without much benefit, than why not just go with the grain and take the good with the bad?
Going against the natural way of things is what I'd call civilization. Giving up on this is sort like saying that justice is an awful lot of work, so why bother with having police and a court system? This would be unpopular even with libertarians.
But in the end, this is all about costs versus benefit, which deserves more than a one-bit answer. There are many possible civilizations.
If you think my position is the nihilistic option of "we can't do anything,so let's throw the whole thing out" then you have gravely misunderstood.
My point isn't about the cost/benefit analysis. It's about finding and understanding the boundary conditions of the system and not trying to get to some delusional Utopia.
I'll state it another way. Freedom of Speech. Widely considered a good thing. Except for those who don't like what you're saying and want to shut you down.
Ok, so we have a lever that we can slide to different settings. Either, you're allowed to say absolutely anything with zero restrictions, or you're not allowed to criticize the regime in the slightest or the lever is set somewhere in between. The question is "where is the optimal place to set the lever?". It seems setting it to North Korean setting where everything is completely restricted doesn't produce good results. Ok, so we set it in the other direction? You can say anything. This seems to be much better. Except it has this consequence that since people can say anything they can say ridiculous things that you wish they wouldn't. And you just have to accept that. There isn't a setting where you can say whatever you like and so can everyone else and no one ever says anything you wish they wouldn't. That setting doesn't exist. This leaves you with the reality of "there's always a small amount of shittiness even in the optimal system."
That's what I mean when I say you have to go with the grain and take the good with the bad. It means learning to live with the parts you don't like, not pretending they don't exist or advocating for the levers to get set to some impossible, magical Utopia setting that isn't commensurate with reality on a fundamental level.
Unfairness is everywhere in the natural world, but cooperative structures exists throughout nature too when they provide a competitive evolutionary advantage.
Humans are deeply social animals. Fairness, altruism, and morality have allowed us to thrive as a species.
I wish my mental models in Ecology were a bit more fleshed out. It's on the list of things to dive into. Regardless, it seems that things that cooperate often cooperate in order to compete against other things and that competion is often life and death in nature hence my nature is pretty brutal comment.
Though I fundamentally agree with you. I think really tricky part is that people view things as zero-sum competion with regards to human competion. And it sort of is. But if you zoom way out you realize it's actually non-zero-sum. So, my view on things is human competion is zero-sum in the short-term and non-zero sum in the long-term under a system that permits it.
The deeper idea is "what's the maximum viable amount of fairness?"
We know from medieval times and before that that most people as powerless serfs and an absolute ruler at the top isn't the optimal distribution. We're on pretty solid ground saying that. We know, though sadly it's contested by some, that the communist model pushes the lever too far in the other direction and that winds up pretty suboptimal too. So the maximum viable amount of fairness lies somewhere in the middle... and what if that is where the lever is set to right now or shortly in the future?
That's problematic because it leaves you with a lot of disaffected people and a "sorry, this is as good as it gets" which doesn't feel good. So it's like... what do you do? Well what can you do?
But things aren't static. We are on a trajectory. The last couple of hundred years have seen massive improvements globally, at least according to the late Dr Hans Rosling's book Factfulness. So, it seems to me there isn't something you can do today or tomorrow to "fix" everything. It's not even obvious the system goes into the shape that some people want to see it squished into, but it does seem that if we let the current machine run its course then eventually everyone has drinking water, electricity, schooling, health care and improving opportunities.
I guess my point is... maybe the system is in the right configuration to maximize the outcome for everyone but the timescale that plays out on is another 200 ~ 300 years?
Could be.
Also side-note: anyone who wants to support Charity Water they do pretty rad work helping chip away at the problem of getting drinkable water to the remaining ~600m that dont have it.
I think increasing economic stratification is very natural and happens often in history. It's just that historically when it gets too extreme, the poor kill the rich and start it all over again.
The rich could avoid this by getting rid of the poor, but they need the poor: historically to do the work, currently to buy the stuff that makes them rich.
Perhaps autonomous robots changes this? Even, the need for private armies, via autonomous killer drones?
Fortunately, collaboration between equals remains the greatest source of wealth creation, so anyone who doesn't do this is poorer, weaker and left behind.
I don’t think anyone really disagrees that the core problem is socioeconomic, it’s just that there seems to be a connection between only getting basic civil rights within living memory, and economic segregation. It’s hard to blame people who want to draw the connection between them. It’s bad enough that redlining maps from years ago still mostly describes current situations. It’s bad enough that zip code is a useful indicator of race for an insurance company.
Are you implying that US ethnic groups that were prohibited from participating in the capital markets, the civil court systems, insurance coverage, housing markets, mortgage lending markets and higher education and the specialized workforce until the late 1960s before then being allowed to start from $0 have a difficult time being uncorrelated from lower socioeconomic classes?
I want to suggest that perhaps those students in CA really were that much better. Not in terms of raw talent, but in terms of the previous 10+ years of their life.
I learned a lot in PhD school, but the most important thing I learned was that others' high school experiences really did prepare them for academic rigor and business success in ways that mine decidedly didn't.
"White children whose parents are in the top fifth of the income distribution have a 41.1 percent chance of staying there as adults... But for black children, it’s only 18 percent.
Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth ... and a tiny 2.5 percent of black children"
Ie, your odds of being in the upper middle class if you grew up:
White and rich: 40%
Black and rich: 20%
White and poor: 10%
Black and poor: 2.5%
Clearly parental income plays a big role, but so does race. We can crunch numbers all day and argue over who has it worse. But it seems far more productive to just acknowledge that they are both pretty bad, and to focus on fixing both problems.
Is that not a difference in Opportunity? Californians are spoiled for choice, with 250-some in-state four year colleges to choose from. Georgia has 85. And, as you describe, Georgia does not have a lot of world-famous institutions. Out-of-state students pay much higher fees, so where you live can be a real influence on where you can afford to go to college.
I mean, I'd call it opportunity. Maybe economic opportunity, if you want.
Definitely. I'm agreeing with the article, although I believe that race and gender are red herrings. The real problem is socioeconomic in nature (fwiw, I say this as a staunch capitalist).
>it's economic segregation we need to watch out for.
Absolutely. And if wages rose faster than returns on capital, every employee would benefit.
But note: race, gender, religious bigotry etc are wedges that prevents cooperation for reform among wage earners. And now there's a bit of inter generation hatred added to that wedge.
And the mechanisms are immensely complicated. Sometimes it is overt[0] but most of the time it's subtle broadcast choices, feed algorithms that select the most shocking story or subconscious habits that span generations. Somehow things like "merry Christmas" vs "happy holidays" far out play any discussion of wage theft or unlawful evictions. If we could just chill, understand that minorities are not taking over the country and move on to economic issues we'd all be far better off.
This is true, but one of the important inputs to socioeconomic asymmetry is race and gender.
It's hard for your parents to escape poverty if the police profile and arrest them. Or if your mom could have been promoted faster than your dad, but wasn't because of a bad company culture.
If you’re interested in addressing this problem, you need to look at economics.
The reasons are not simple, but the bottom line is race and gender focuse equality efforts _always_ fail to help the lower class. Always. Statistically, gender and race gaps in economic equality have only grown since the 1970s.
And you know, if we framed it as economic segregation it could absolutely fix the racial/gender issues. I mean if we, say, ensured everyone had an equal starting point (more or less) at 18, we would dramatically have had to reduce down those other issues. But what’s better is we will not have left opposite <race/gender> out of our consideration.
Race and gender are a problem but it seems like those two things get way too much attention given other paradigms that demonstrate a more wholistic approach to social fairness.
I always wonder how much there actually is out there. It’s hard to say there’s such a thing as “raw potential” considering how much being successful depends on having parents who groom you for society.
I grew up around a lot of kids I personally believe were very smart or driven. But when your parents don’t instill a sense of working in a certain way or creating a career path with certain abstract goals - you just aren’t going to get optimal use for your potential.
Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home, or to attend the school of their favorite college football team. UGA and GA Tech are solidly ranked schools and a lot of graduates from there have very good outcomes.
> Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home
I would argue this is the reason for most people. My cousin and my wife's sister were both accepted to Harvard for undergrad, but they turned it down because they thought it was too far away. Personally, I don't understand this at all (I would happily move wherever for a good opportunity), but it wouldn't surprise me if most people refused a 2-3x salary increase if it required moving from a rural area to a big city a few hours away by plane.
Well there’s all sorts of issues with a big move. For example I live in the Midwest and live in a 2100 square foot house that I bought for $250,000. Average developer salary around here is 80-100k or so, but even if I got an offer for $300k from Google I doubt me and my stay at home wife with our two kids could move there and replicate our lives at all.
Quick Zillow search says it’d be 10x as much for a house the size of where I am now, for 3x the salary? No thanks.
I wouldn't call Georgia realer than California, but people do seem to have some severe blinders to regional inequalities that don't map neatly onto a strictly demographic category.
Dude, you are way off, not to mention offensive. Georgia (particularly the Metro Atlanta area where I grew up in) is so much more diverse than Santa Monica (where I live now) or the lily-white Bay Area, or my classes at UCLA, it's actually not even close.
As is common nowadays, I think he's using "white" as code for "not black".
For those coming from the South, it must be something of a shift to assuming that you can have a proportional, diverse environment in which black people are, as in the country as a whole, 13% of the population.
People in the Bay Area have a different view of diversity than people who grew up in the Southeast. What we notice in the Bay Area is that there aren't any black folk.
Right, I was looking at engineering only - https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-te... . Top 10 in many undergrad engineering programs. 4th overall in undergrad engineering. But yes, being an engineer, everything is about engineering for me. :)
That situation exists on the coasts too, where most of our cities are. The thing about race and gender is that you see the phenomenon play out in wealthy communities too.
Well, that's what extreme capitalism brings you. I'm not holding a hammer and a sickle here, but I'm convinced that the right to access a good education is more important than the right to sell it. Same goes for health services.
My personal experience: I went to a public University in my country. My parents paid around $800 per year (I had a 50% discount, because I have 3 younger siblings). I don't know how high it's ranked. It is honestly not something people ask. Most public schools are simply good enough.
We have some private schools, but a lot of students end up there because they don't want to put a lot of effort so their daddies pay them a title. And since the schools don't want to lose them they give them a pass, or dumb subjects down. So a lot of private schools are worse (in the sense that they require less effort) than public ones. To the point where some job offers started including the clause: "Any Student with the so-and-so degree, except those from this Particular Private School".
Not having a hierarchy of good and bad universities is a deliberate policy decision. Before ~1968 Germany had elite universities, like Göttingen, Tübingen and Heidelberg among others, equivalent to the position of HYPS or Oxbridge, with other excellent universities in the rank below, like Columbia and Cal Tech or LSE and Imperial. After 1968 there was a deliberate effort to make that irrelevant. Now there are good departments and there are better and worse universities but the range is so small that which university you went to isn’t worth mentioning. Germany is still a research powerhouse but it’s all about different branches of the Max Planck Institute, not universities.
You think the US can deliberately reduce the funding and prestige of universities like that? They don’t even have a federal education system.
The Valley is so disconnected from the "real" America. I hate using that term, but to anyone that's lived in more rural non-coastal areas will quickly realize that the issue is not racism or sexism (although these do play a part). Rather, it's a purely economic stratification. I'm a 1.5-generation American (moved here when I was 11) and attended HS in Georgia at a mediocre high school -- underfunded, understaffed, etc. Our valedictorian is the only one from my graduating class that went to an Ivy League school (and he could "only" manage to get accepted by Cornell). Just about everyone else went to a local school: either UGA (barely breaks the top-50), GSU (terribly ranked, like top-200; I went here my freshman year), or GA Tech (which was extremely competitive and hard to get into). Compare this to my sister's high school (which she graduated from after my family and I moved to Southern California): about 20% attended Ivy League schools, and a significant portion attended highly-ranked California institutions: Stanford, CalTech, UCLA, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, etc.
It's hard to argue that these Californian students were that much smarter than my Georgia cohort, and yet fate threw these two different sets of youngsters on widely different life trajectories. Race, gender, religion all play a role -- but more importantly, it's economic segregation we need to watch out for.