We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists.
It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.
> We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists.
Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudiced beliefs, and applies it to structural forces that operate without any individuals being consciously racist. The same academics who talk about “systemic racism” readily admit that prejudiced beliefs have actually declined.
If you educated people about the history of e.g. FHA redlining and how that affects people today, I think you’d find far fewer people deny that those effects exist.
Besides that, we’re now teaching it to all children of color, who definitely don’t suffer from systemic racism. Asians and Latinos are on a course to achieve economic parity with whites, just like previous immigrant generations:
> It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.
Sure, we should definitely teach kinds about the history of these things, how they create structural barriers, statistics on persistent disparities, when they’re old enough to understand. But even then, we should actually say what we mean instead of using rhetoric chosen by activists for shock effect.
There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects.
Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
Whoa. Now you’re using “systemic racism” to cover a lot of stuff that isn’t racist at all.
Immigration quotas that you speak of were created to increase diversity of immigrants. If we didn’t have them, then Chinese and Indian immigrants would get most of the visas pushing out other countries. It’s actually the opposite of systemic racism since it’s increasing racial diversity of immigrants.
How is it not racist if it discriminates against people based on race? Sure it increases equality of outcome, but it decreases the equality of opportunity.
> There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects.
In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.
> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).
As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.
> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
I’m not sure I would even call this racism.
> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.
Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.
It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.
> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.
I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.
(Immigration quotas are a weird one -- on one hand, you want to keep all the H1B visas from going to the mega-consultancies like Tata or Infosys that end up not paying very much, but on the other, of the 18 most populous countries, US is at #3, Russia is at #9, and the rest are outside of Europe. It's probably not racism! But at the same time, it does limit immigration from these larger countries which disproportionately skew Asian in favor of smaller countries that skew white. Europe is split into roughly as many countries as Asia, despite having a sixth of the population!)
I mean, affirmative action as a wedge issue for Asian Americans is already in place, whether it's achieving proportional representation or not -- the premise is that there are already higher admission standards at elite universities for Asian Americans than even whites (see: Harvard lawsuit). I agree with you there, that on the face of it, when taken in isolation, affirmative action is bad for Asian Americans! At the same time, you know which group is really under-represented at Harvard and would benefit from proportional representation? Non-hispanic whites (with "only" 40% of the student body, versus 60% of the US population).
I'm honestly curious to what extent the stats on median household income or whichever metric(s) you're using to gauge economic parity are skewed by the tendency of Asian Americans to concentrate in high cost-of-living urban areas. For instance, it's not a fair comparison to say "oh, Asian Americans who disproportionately live in NYC / SF make more than the median white American who lives in Wisconsin".
> Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people.
But we can agree that it exists, right? Whatever term you’d use, the phenomenon it describes is real. And it refers to present injustices as well as historical ones.
Many of the phenomena it describes are real, for sure, at least with respect to Black people. My Maryland county wasn’t desegregated until 1968, in my parents’ generation. That has produced statistical disparities that persist to this day.
The data don't support racism being the causes of the disparate outcomes. That makes it unreasonable to start with the assumption that the "system is racist."
If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.
Here's one example:
> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.
> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.
> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?
The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.
When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.
There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.
I don't see systemic racism as being something activists say for shock effect.
The effects of Systemic racism is quantifiable and reproducible. You can simply do things like sending resumes to different employers with no meaningful changed but making the resume seem more like it's written by somebody of a different race. From what I see westernized Asians and Caucasians are preferred, anybody who sounds too foreign or too much like another minority is not.
Affirmative action is meant to counterveil this but in itself is the most brazen and blatent example of systemic racism in society, involving both power and prejudice, since affirmative action has teeth. The entire function of it is to put your finger on the scale to ensure certain racial groups get hired in preference of others.
Sure prejudiced beliefs have likely declined in general since say the 60s but racism is prevalent and omnipresent and hidden behind euphemisms and not called racism. The big reason why "systemic racism" specifically has come into vogue is that people are more opaque and dishonest about their prejudices for the sake of social survival.
People advocate for systemic racism while proudly calling themselves anti racists. Those against affirmative action and such also consider themselves anti-racists, but seem unconcerned that no affirmative action would effectively lead to a society where certain groups will certainly disperportionatey suffer from systemic racism - often conveniently to their own benefit.
I can't see racism as not pervasive, although I think it's easy to start fearing prejudice and microagressions from others that simply don't exist out of paranoia, to end up getting oppressed by phantoms.
I'd argue there's a lot more nuances to system racism than the general narrative that is currently being perpettuated. Looking into those nuances would be frowned upon because certain groups differ from other groups for reasons that are not truly understood but would cause us to ask questions we're not comfortable with.
Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.
I mean really. Do you really think that if someone who's unsuccessful because of laziness that if only they hadn't heard about systemic racism they would have a better work ethic? The laziness comes first. The excuse is crafted after the fact. If it wasnt that they'd claim to have some other disadvantage or problem.
A lot of psychotherapy is convincing individuals that they are in control of their actions and can decide how they react to and influence their environment.
A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.
There needs to be nuance for sure. People are still responsible for their own actions and the only way to guarantee you wont succeed is to not try.
At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot of other people
You're missing the point. The current narrative of systemic racism and the victimhood culture it creates isnt helping, it's exacerbating the issues and reinforcing itself.
By conditioning people into believing that an outside force is the primary, if not only factor impacting their lack of success, you demotivate them from trying to adjust other factors that could improve their situation. The issue isn't that we address racism, it's that racism has become the end-all rationalisation for any deficiency at the individual level.
You seem to be missing my point. There ARE systemic disadvantages to being black.
I get that you're of the opinion that telling people about racial inequality can demotivate them and make them feel fatalistic about their futures, but I don't necessarily agree with your assessment to the degree this is the case and you seem to think there is no room for nuance here. We must stop talking about this immediately. People are too simple to understand that there is still some unfairness that needs to be resolved, but that they should do their best regardless. No we must lie to them and tell them the system is fair and through their ignorance they will magically overcome the disadvantages they face.
You seem to think fear of systemic racism is a bigger obstacle to the success of black people than actual systemic racism and I just think that's absurd. Your basic premise that fear of institutional racism can be demotivating is valid and worth consideration. You're elevating it to the root cause of all problems is absurd. A black job applicant will receive half as many callbacks for job interviews compared to an identically qualified white applicant. There are little obstacles like that all over our society. Can they be overcome through tenacity and perseverance? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't work to fix that %#@#? Hell No!
The issue is that it's not framed that way. It's framed as all or nothing, that blacks fail only because of racism. That's my lk entire issue. The message isn'tthat they're disadvantaged, the message is that there is 0 chance.
One encourages them to hold out as it gets better, the other for them to give up till it gets better.
I'm not calling it the root of all problems either, so please don't put words in my mouth. I'm saying it's not even a solution, it's the opposite, worsening the situation and feeding itself.
And to be specific here, I'm referring to the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
Principally because "the framing" isn't some well-defined objective thing, it's all a matter of perception, which means it's always possible to read whatever narrative you like into the facts.
Like this:
> the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
This perception is yours, not the facts on the ground.
Wouldn't it logically follow that issues of systemic racism are a bigger problem than the narrative of systemic racism? Can't that be true without being a brainwashed white guilted liberal?
One problem is the narrative makes it harder to make progress on systemic racism.
Outside of very liberal strongholds identity politics can't get passed and they get in the way of any progress you want to actually make at trying to minimize the difference in outcomes between races.
>Do you really think that if someone who's unsuccessful because of laziness that if only they hadn't heard about systemic racism they would have a better work ethic?
In the case of that particular individual I'd say it's less laziness and more of systemic racism being deterrent to attempt self-improvement. In the "even if I try, I won't get ahead because these systems will hold me back" sense.
The point I was trying to make is that it's a lot easier to point the blame at something than admit to yourself that you suck - even if you're capable.
I don't know what your definition of systemic racism is, so I can't make a proper argument for/against it.
In any case, your comment has given me some food for thought in how I approach this person.
There is something to be said about demotivation and dispair. As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about global warming there is a tendency to have bouts of feeling doomed here and there. It's not unjustified, but it also does no good. We need the information so we can solve the problem. We just need to learn to process it in a healthy way.
I would just say that anyone who claims they won't get ahead even if they try because of systemic racism is being ignorant. They might have to try harder than a white person would. They might face some adversity, but there really is no excuse for not trying. It would literally perpetuate the problem.
>I would just say that anyone who claims they won't get ahead even if they try because of systemic racism is being ignorant. They might have to try harder than a white person would. They might face some adversity, but there really is no excuse for not trying. It would literally perpetuate the problem.
Not only does systemic racism exist, not only has the environment succeeded in inducing a victim mentality in this person, you are now blaming them for it? Classical "pull yourself by your bootstraps" bullshit. Do you really not see how dehumanizing your viewpoint is, and how such attitudes help perpetuate that person's inaction?
>As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about global warming there is a tendency to have bouts of feeling doomed here and there.
Not to belittle your own existential fears, but feeling doomed due to global warming at least doesn't make you feel like there's something wrong with you in particular.
It's strange - people with a victim mentality are victims of their victim mentality. It's recursive and self-fulfilling, and it does take some amount of bootstrapping - which is, however, perfectly impossible in the absence of a bootloader and someone to push the power button.
It's true that if a black person gives up without trying because they assume they can't succeed then their failure contributes to the inequality between the races. I'm sure I could have put it better. I was most concerned about pushing back on the notion that this subject should be taboo because somehow discussing systemic racism is the real cause of inequality.
>It's true that if a black person gives up without trying because they assume they can't succeed then their failure contributes to the inequality between the races.
Not really my point. But what you're saying is legitimate too. Though who are we to judge, considering we don't even have unambiguous language to discuss the subject without risking to offend each other's sensibilities.
>I was most concerned about pushing back on the notion that this subject should be taboo because somehow discussing systemic racism is the real cause of inequality.
I'm not sure if I can resolve the nesting of those clauses. IMHO, taboos are generally counterproductive because avoiding the taboo gives it more power. And enforcing a particular language, tone, or other mode of discourse about race relations can be used to perpetuate thinking that reinforces racism "in the name of fighting racism".
This whole thing is starting to look more and more like we need to find out if we're even capable of discussing systemic racism without freaking out, so we can try to conclusively establish what systemic racism is, so that we can look for a solution to systemic racism, so that we can finally stop cops from shooting civilians for being the "wrong" color. This yak shaving is truly the work of a higher intellect...
Sounds like plenty of people with ADHD I know who don't have their meds. I wouldn't say they are lazy, I would say they have poor executive function when not taking medication to compensate.
We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism."
This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?
I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that.
It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
> I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
Because if they genuinely believe that blacks are inferior, then racism truly musn't exist from their perspective. They think that blacks will naturally be worse off and thus elevating them from there to a level where they're equal is actually unfair and racist to whites.
It's insane, I know, but it really is how people like that think.
How do you propose to gain equality? You can't force inherent ability into someone. Perhaps what you want is flat wages for all jobs, including unemployment?
Since racism is too shocking an idea for you, consider intellectually disabled people instead. How would you make them equal? We can provide special support services to improve their quality of life but we can't turn them into engineers if they're not capable.
That's not at all what anyone here means by "equal".
There is zero scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps exist because Black people are genetically inferior to whites, and there is a ton of scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps are influenced by systems we have set up that have nothing to do with the individual. Equality means fixing those systems.
Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.
The color of your skin has no bearing on your innate ability to be an engineer, so what when we try to address structural inequality we're not trying to suppress anyone's unique abilities. Quite the opposite, we are trying to remove the structures like racism, education gaps, and investment gaps that get in the way of people's unique abilities. How many Black engineers never get a chance to discover their potential simply because their school is too poor to afford computers or software?
We are also not trying to force everyone into a single uniform outcome, we are trying to remove systems that enforce uniform outcomes based on attributes like social connections and income that have nothing to do with innate talent. How many otherwise successful Black businesses were destroyed by openly racist policies like redlining, or because investors have an unscientific, biased view of what a successful businessperson "ought" to look like or what people they "ought" to know?
Now, separately, equality also means guaranteeing the same basic rights and social assurances to everyone regardless of their race and ability. That doesn't mean that everyone can do everything equally as well, it doesn't mean that everyone should have the same job or that success is evil. But even people who are not qualified to be engineers should be able to at least live normal lives without the threat of extreme poverty. They should be able to find housing. They shouldn't be put in situations where they're frightened of their local police. Equality means that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness belongs to everyone, regardless of where you were born or what other people think about the color of your skin. So we're not looking to get rid of success, be we are looking to build basic social safety nets that guarantee that people are not left behind or discarded by society just because a company doesn't think they're useful enough to deserve a livable wage.
And yeah, that applies to intellectually disabled and differently abled communities as well. Being born with a learning disability is not a good reason for someone to be homeless. Those people also deserve dignity and a place in society.
> Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.
That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems. So far, the only politically correct scientifically based reason I've seen has been that it's mostly due to the behavior of black mothers. There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. If that's really the problem, then that's where the solution needs to be focused, not on whatever fits your personal political ideology.
You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. I've looked for it, and asked people like yourself who I would expect to be motivated to find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. If there's no evidence either way, then you're not being intellectually honest by rejecting one hypothesis on ideological grounds.
> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem.
Your research is out of date on these topics.
General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious).
You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume.
This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results.
So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up...
> The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be?
> You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems...
Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ.
> You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic.
First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.
And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence.
But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you.
> There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life.
So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence?
I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions.
I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.
Yes, I know that but how does it show that group IQ certainly isn't determined by genetics of race?
> You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.
Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not? How are you making the decision for ridiculousness?
Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.
No one at all is claiming that there are no biological components to IQ. What we're claiming is that those effects are overstated, and that they aren't correlated with skin color, and that Black outcomes in the US can not be dismissed by saying they're a biological outcome.
(Some of) the reasons we're claiming that IQ is insufficient to explain racial disparities in the US are:
A) people have spent over 100 years trying to form this bullcrap correlation going back to the early days of slavery, and they've been disproved over and over again and we've started to notice a pattern here with how race scientists work.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
You say you understand that both nature and nurture are a part of IQ. Then surely, there are policies we can pass that will affect the nurture side of things. You're not denying that nurture exists, so even if you genuinely believed that 50% of these outcomes were from biology, I'd still expect you to at least support housing and education policies that can help with the other 50%. I expect that you'd still be on-board with scientifically-backed improvements that have been proven to affect IQ.
And yet you're on here claiming that measures to reduce poverty in Black communities can't possibly help. That's not a claim that's consistent with an acknowledgement that IQ has a behavioral component, the only way you'd assume that factors like poverty aren't at least part of the problem is if you believed the gap was 100% purely genetic. So do you?
> Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not?
First, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming. Linking skin pigmentation to the brain is an extraordinary (and silly) claim, and you need to show some evidence for that kind of claim.
Secondly, it's a ridiculous claim because it's not being made in a vacuum. It's being made as the next step in a long chain of claiming that Black people on average couldn't possibly be educated, and then that they could never read well, and then that they could never own their own businesses, and then that they could never self-govern or take care of their own communities. And after a while of watching the same claim get disproved over and over again, you start to realize these people don't know what they're talking about and they're just making stuff up out of thin air. In this comment section, we follow Bayes.
So in that context, when somebody comes up to me and says, "okay, I know the last 20 arguments people made about biological inferiority in Blacks were wrong, and fundamentally I'm about to make the same argument again, but this time is special and you have to take it seriously..." Just, no, you're wasting my time at that point unless you're bringing some kind of real compelling evidence to the table.
And I don't see any compelling evidence you're bringing to the table.
> Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.
If there is a shared set of genes linked to intelligence that show up the same in every Black person regardless of their country of origin, or regardless of their percentage African/European ancestry, then I would expect people to be able to point to those genes. But they can't.
You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan. And yeah, that's kind of silly and ridiculous. A comparatively small number of genes control skin color, and it's not really consistent with our current understanding of genetics to think that intelligence is based off of something so specific.
I'm just arguing that it's possible (not certain) that race probabilistically determines life outcomes such as income partly for biological reasons, not only systemic racism or culture. Those other factors exist but I don't think they're obviously the only factors.
Measures to reduce black poverty can certainly help reduce black poverty, but I don't think it's known that they can bring blacks up to the same level of poverty as whites. So we may never completely solve the problem of black poverty with assistance.
> disproved over and over again
Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
How is that?
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
That's consistent with my idea.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
Straw man.
> It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming.
I'm not talking about skin color but "black" in the commonly used meaning of the word. Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
> You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
I'm not claiming there are shared genes causing it. It might have appeared independently for different black ethnicities.
If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
> You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan.
You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not super convinced. I just think it's a realistic possibility.
Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist. Even Darwin discovered evolution without knowing what genes were. Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
> Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
Can I identify a proof that Black people can read and self govern? I mean... the modern world? Are you arguing that early race science claims haven't been disproven? Are you familiar with the early claims that race scientists made? You should look up some of them if you're not.
The vast majority of early race science claims can be disproven by your own claims. A 10-15 point IQ gap is not high enough to render someone unable to read, vote, or understand mathematics. If early race science claims were true, then we would expect to see a much larger gap than we currently see. And we don't.
So what's been happening is we've spent a large portion of American history (and pre-American history) listening to people make strong claims that Black people were biologically unable to accomplish certain tasks. Then Black people accomplished those tasks, and scientific racists moved the goalposts a bit and said, "okay, they could accomplish those tasks, but they won't be able to do these ones." And that's continued basically unabated to modern times, where the goalposts are now at, "okay, but they can't achieve equal pay/productivity, they don't have the genetics for that task."
And at no point has the race science community had the presence of mind to take a step back and think, "maybe given that all of our testable predictions have been proven wrong throughout history, we don't understand genetics as well as we think we do."
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> B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics. How is that?
See the remaining paragraphs I wrote in that comment. If you need more clarification, our modern understanding of racial categories is that they are more socially designated than genetically designated (more on that below). Our understanding of intelligence is that it is enormously complex and not likely to be controlled by a small number of genes behind, say, skin color. Increasingly, modern scientists don't even really think of genetic intelligence as being reducible to a single number anyway. Most modern geneticists have rejected a race/IQ link. There's still a lot about intelligence that the scientific community is still learning, but the people in the labs right now doing that research on intelligence do not think your theories are likely to be true.
> C) [...] There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors [...] D) [...] E) [...]
So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
We've had a really long conversation at this point for you to just now let on that you think Black outcomes are in fact at least partially influenced by external factors that aren't related to innate ability (ie, systemic racism and/or inequality).
> Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
??? I'm not sure how to respond to this. African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection. It also doesn't change anything about the fact that African American genetics are also not uniform at this point. A large percentage of the Black community is multiracial, and your "commonly used" definition of Black is primarily determined by who looks Black, regardless of the percentage of African American heritage that person actually has.
> If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
Your research is once again out of date, recent studies suggest that early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
And again, if your ancestry claim was true we'd expect to see very different outcomes in individuals with mixed ancestry, and... we don't see that. So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities. That is not a result you would expect to see if this was genetic.
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> Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist.
Yes, it is. I don't know how else to get this across to you, so maybe an analogy will work. I'll entertain your idea once you're able to disprove to me that the the liberal/conservative divide in our current country is based on innate intelligence.
You say there are other explanations for rural/urban income gaps and college demographics that fit that data better? You say that class divides, culture, and location are obviously better explanations? I'm sorry, I'm sure those are contributing factors, but until you conclusively disprove the genetic connection, then we have to entertain the possibility, even though the evidence is spurious and it doesn't really make sense as a causal relationship in the first place. You say that even if it was true, it shouldn't derail conversations about bias or political equity or censorship? That's certainly a perspective, but maybe we should bring the theory up on every conversation about liberal bias anyway. I'm not saying it's the reason, just that it's a realistic possibility that no conservative has ever conclusively found proof against.
Do you see the problem here? It's really easy to make silly and even outright harmful claims like the above and then retreat back behind "just asking questions". That's why (particularly when we're dealing with a field like race science which has a history of being incorrect and harmful) we demand a certain standard of evidence. Like a set of genes. Or at least a correlation that can't be better explained by external stimuli.
> Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
But not half as ridiculous as the idea that now that we know genes exist we should ignore them. We have better standards now. This is like arguing that we don't need to identify viruses because some people in olden times washed their hands occasionally.
And to be clear, we knew that dog breeding worked because we could run experiments and see it working. We knew that evolution existed because we could make testable claims and predictions that were proven true. Both of those things are a million miles away from "I have no evidence for this, but you can't disprove it." Evolution was not running around claiming that it should get the benefit of the doubt until it was disproven. It brought real evidence and testable predictions to the table that made sense based on what we knew about the world.
That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven? It's a strawman. It's hard to read so much of your writing when you can make such extreme misinterpretations of what I'm saying.
> African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection.
That's quite simply not what black means in common language. It doesn't matter what the cause of the skin color is, the correlations with IQ and income are not the same.
> early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
Yes. That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me. This is getting frustrating.
> So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities.
Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Anyway, still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
> That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven?
Look, it's not my fault you don't know the origins of race science or what the claims were that your predecessors were making. If the origins of your theory are embarrassing to you, then... I mean, I don't know what to tell you, maybe reflect on why those origins are embarassing.
More recently, the modern wave of race science has been largely driven by people like Murray, who posited in the Bell Curve that the 10-15 point IQ gap is primarily genetic and highly heritable. Murray suggests that social interventions are unlikely to significantly lower that gap, and that instead we should focus on eugenics (he uses nicer language of course).
You and I have already disproven Murray's theory in previous comments by noting that gaps decrease when race is hidden from hiring managers, and by noting that wage gaps persist in industries where success does not have a high correlation with intelligence. So we don't need to rehash that theory, you're already on board with me that Murray is wrong to say that the current IQ gap can be mostly explained by genetics. You've already softened that claim, and now you say that the current gap is partially explained by genetics.
The point is, the entire history of race science has been people like you making claims about Black inferiority, getting those claims debunked, and then shifting the goalposts a little and making the same exact claim just to a slightly lesser degree. There's a pattern here.
> That's quite simply not what black means in common language.
Yes, it really is; the person on the street is not using ancestry tests to determine what percentage "Black" people are, the common denominator is skin color. Black communities do not have the uniform genetic background you're assuming, and common metrics people on the street use to determine "Blackness" do not line up with ancestry.
This is broad scientific consensus, the position of the AAPA since the late 90s can be summed up as: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. [...] Notably, variants are not distributed across our species in a manner that maps clearly onto socially-recognized racial groups."[0] This is the general consensus of people who are actually studying genetics and anthropology in the real world.
And in fact, when you actually go over the studies even from race scientists, what you find is that in the majority of cases the racial phenotype even they use to categorize their subjects also lines up with the AAPA's view. You know how the majority of these race science studies determine who is and isn't Black? Skin color and heckin self-reporting of racial identity. So it's just pure revisionism to claim that "actually, we meant something different by Black the entire time".
If you are trying to make a claim here based on purely percentage of African American heritage, then you need to throw a lot of existing race research out and start over, and that includes books like the Bell Curve which were almost entirely based on metrics like self reporting and not actual measurements of ancestry.
> That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me.
My deep apologies. Just to make sure I understand, when you said that "another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA", what you actually meant was that African Americans do have recent Neanderthal DNA?
And not to keep harping on this, but "shared" is putting in a lot of work here, because as I keep mentioning, African American populations do not have the genetic uniformity you claim.
> Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Take a look at stats released from companies like 23AndMe and Ancestry. Our best guess is that the average African-American genome is about 20-30% European (although we've only recently started really measuring this, so those numbers might change over time). That range can vary drastically as well, it's not that all Black people are uniformly 25% European, they might be close to 50%, or as low as 10%. I'm not sure what kind of reference you're looking for with that, but there have been a couple of press releases and cooperative studies using 23andme data that go into detail on their findings.[1]
It's pretty clear that the Black IQ gap is consistent across demographics and geographic regions in the US, which... like I said, leads us to question why we're not seeing more variation, even in studies from people who believe in scientific racism -- because the actual racial makeup of those groups is not consistent across geography.
----
> still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
And still no clear evidence against "Conservatives are genetically predisposed to being lower education/poorer than the average population", so I also assume that evidence doesn't exist.
I will make you understand how burden of proof works. If you believe that it's my job to disprove that Black IQ gaps are genetic, then I want you to disprove to me that rural/urban Conservative/Liberal IQ and wage gaps are genetic -- or I want you to explain to me why you think that theory shouldn't be factored into every discussion about university bias, voting rights, and industry discrimination against Conservatives.
And of course, I'm still waiting for a response to the below quote:
> So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
You say that you agree with me that a purely biological difference, even if it does exist, is not enough on its own to explain the gap we see. So you should be fine with progressive policies that attempt to eliminate the non-heritable reasons for inequality.
> continue to exist after you correct for experience/education
No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could.
> dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.
Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists?
> but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use
That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence.
So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed.
So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life?
You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?
> your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence
Not my claim.
As you surely know, IQ tests are scaled by age according to how normal people develop. So an individual who undergoes unusual life experiences can easily have their IQ change with age since their development would deviate from what the rest of the population has. If every person had all the best IQ enhancing interventions, then I would expect IQ scores to be more consistent with age since the environmental factors are controlled, leaving the inherent factors to dominate. But that's not the world we live in, and you can "train for the test".
> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school.
I'm not going to waste my time on this if you're not going to stand by your claims.
The IQ gap that appears and is measured before school age can be reduced by external intervention. Therefore, if the tests are accurate, then something is happening to those kids as they age to make their skills regress. If the early tests are not accurate, then it stands to reason that adult tests could suffer from the same problems and should be similarly distrusted.
Either way, your claim that IQ tests prove that the sole cause of gaps must be introduced before children reach school age is unsubstantiated.
Consider for a moment that you are both right. That there are in fact heritable biological differences that can aggregate to average group-wide differences like the parent comment implied, and that assuming that this is the case is harmful for the individual and society, like you argued.
If that's the case, the parent comment, while embarrassing for this site, has a valid claim - that at some point blaming everything on the system could become detrimental to everyone.
What if skull shape determines a person's personality? It would be best if your hypothetical scenario was something with more than a shred of long discredited science behind it.
Are you aware of a discussion of the best scientific research and arguments on either side? my understanding is the same as yours but I’d like to become more educated on the topic
Basically the only academic work since the decline of eugenics that has tried to make this case is the bell curve by Charles Murray. It attempted to prove that the differences in IQ between races are genetic, but it's methodology was not up to the standards you would want for such a provocative claim.
This video goes over a lot of the problems with the book.
Not at all. There's a lot of research into the causes of black/white inequality and IQ differences. It's nowhere near as conclusive as you suggest. This is not phrenology so your comparison to that is an unproductive straw-man.
Where's the evidence that there is no significant inherent biological such as genetics? Just because it's a popular belief doesn't mean it's strongly supported by evidence. I haven't seen any. I even saw an adoption study that attempted to answer that, and when it embarrassingly turned out that black kids still had lower IQs despite their white adopted families, the authors suddenly discovered they'd forgotten to control for age at adoption and that must surely have been the cause of the differences. They were silent on the effect of the race of the biological parents even though it could be clearly seen in the data that the more black biological parents a child had, the lower his IQ despite the race and income of his adopted parents.
> teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?
No. You're confusing group outcomes with individual ones.
To avoid the emotion of racism, you can look at all Americans instead. Average income in the US is $30,000/year. Is it wrong to teach that to kids? No. Does it cause them to fatalistically assume they can't earn more than that because they're unlucky to be American? No. Each individual kid might not be one of the destined-for-low-wages people.
> No. You're confusing group outcomes with individual ones.
This is a weird kind of selectivity. You weren't making this argument when OP claimed that teaching about systemic racism would be fatalistic. You were perfectly fine with the conflation between group outcomes and individual outcomes on that front.
> That leads to the belief that the persistent differences in life outcomes must be caused by oppression. ... Not to get all Godwinny but that's also how 1930's Germans saw Jews.
That is not what Nazi Germany believed. Also, coincidentally, German Jews were not more rich then average, there was no persistent difference like that. They were lower middle class that clustered in the few cities. Portion of them were refugees from Eastern Europe.
Also, Germany had actually very small Jewish minority which was very integrated.
True. I don't see how you can possibly deny the existence of systemic racism in a country where all the top educational institutions actively discriminate against asians.
A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.
This can also apply to antiracism, which as I understand it [1] is policy that attempts to undo structural racism, not policy that is absent of race-conscious treatment. I think this question would also be more interesting to answer because everyone already agrees that affirmative action literally does factor in race. The more controversial part is whether it serves to reinforce or counteract some forms of systemic racism.
[1] From a modern viewpoint (e.g. Kendi), although I'm not sure if this word previously had different uses.
From this perspective (Kendi, etc.), it is very much not the same as racism and is not just "racism" being rebranded. The term "anti-racism" really only makes sense when you consider this dichotomy using the more specific definition of racism.
Let's make a ranking system for incoming students. There will be an academic score for things like test scores and grades, and there will be a "personality score" for, well, god knows what. Turns out that Asian applicants score higher on the academic score, so what we'll do then is rank them lower on personality (though in person interviews have ranked then the same as students of other races). This is what we call the "holistic" admissions system, and it was designed in the 1920's to keep out the Jews.
Hmm, is this racism or anti-racism? Because it's literally what Harvard does.
Instead of just saying systemic racism exists, why not point out examples? Then people can judge for themselves what effect it may have on them instead of feeling like there's this oppressive "other" which is the cause of anything they don't like about their life and there's no point struggling against it because it'll just crush them anyway.
This list is more tailored to highlight systemic racism in criminal justice, but the economic side is just as important. There are much higher levels of poverty in black communities and that can be directly tied to the fact that in many ways black people were systematically prevented from building wealth for most of US history while white people were provided trillions of dollars in government subsidized economic opportunity that black people were excluded from. From the homesteading of thr 1800s to the fha backed loans that gave white people homes in the suburbs for lower mortgage rates than black people had to pay for rent to live in the redlined slums they were cordoned into by law.
[1] Police stop black drivers significantly more than white drivers when the sun is up and they are able to see that the driver is black, but not at night when they can't see the race of the driver. Meaning race is often the determining factor for why black drivers are pulled over.
[2] Unarmed black people are 3.49 times as likely to be killed as unarmed white people and local crime rates have zero effect on this statistic.
[3] Black and white officers use force at similar rates in white neightborhoods, but White police officers use force significantly more compared to black police officers when responding to calls in minority neighborhoods.
[4] Police in oakland find contraband at the same rate regardless of the race of the person, but search black drivers 4x more often.
[5] The more white a suspect appears to be the less likely police are to use force. The more black a suspect appears the more likely it is that police will use force.
[6] Black police officers are more likely to be shot by their fellow police than white police officers.
[7] Oaklad police disproportionately handcuff blacks at stunning levels regardless of which area of the city you look at.
[8] In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).”
[9] The DOJ investigation into Ferguson PD, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson PD that violates the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and federal law.” The scathing report found that FPD was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines.
[10] In Chicago, a 2016 report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet Chicago PDs own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.”
[11]2014 ACLU analysis of Illinois DOT data found: “Black and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”
[12] Black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted and more likelt to be framed for a crime they didn't commit.
[13] Black kids are more likely to be tried as an adult.
[14] Black people get 20% longer prison sentences for the same crimes even when you control for criminal history.
[15] Black students are more likely to be arrested at school. This appears to be a function of increased security at predominantly black schools and not because black students commit crimes at school at higher rates.
[16] Security levels in schools are determined by how many black kids go to the school and not crime levels.
[17] Predominantly black schools are chronically underfunded compared to predominantly white schools.
[18] An identical resume with a white sounding name like Stephen or Susan is twice as likely to recieve a call for a job interview compared to the same resume with an ethnically black sounding name like Jamal or Latisha.
[19] Minorities who alter their resumes to seem white get more job interviews.
[20] Banks targeted black homeowners for predatory homeloans and refinancing in the lead up to the 2008 crisis. Causing black families to be disproportionately harmed by the forclosure crisis.
[21] owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses. This study controls for crime rates. Neighborhood amenities like schools, parks, walkability, and public transportation. The size and age of homes etc.
[22] In an experiment landlords responding to emails treated Blacks, Arab males, Muslims, and single parents unfavorably.
If you wanted to talk about about systemic racism you would talk about things like single family zoning and ability to get mortgages.
There was a strongtowns article that literally had nothing to do with race, merely about getting rid of single family zoning. It didn't take long for someone in the comment section to post how building affordable housing in those places will ruin everything and everyone is naive because they haven't had to live in a ghetto.
There was an economics explained video about real estate that even implied that race was one of the factors was how far the homeowners are away from other races.
Coming from Europe this was completely unexpected for me, turns out, segregation in the USA never went away it merely became more socially acceptable.
Number 2 for instance, is such a small chance it is not really worth mentioning. I believe white people get hit by lightning something like 6 times more likely than blacks and it happens way more than being unarmed and shot by police.
The population of white people is about 6 times bigger. That should mostly explain the lightning disparity.
The statistics on unarmed people being killed by police account for differences in population sizes. Also while that is a hot button issue it's really the tip of the iceberg for this subject. The body of work showing systemic racism is an ongoing problem in the US holds up just fine if you ignore police shootings altogether.
Is there a way I'm missing to save comments on HN besides also commenting on them so they can be revisited later? I'd like to save this. This is one of the best meta-summaries I've ever seen, on any topic.
You can get a link to a particular comment by clicking on the timestamp next to the posters name.
May I recommend an organized note taking system copying the literal text and link for reference. I like org-roam with a hotkey to capture title and if existent any highlighted text.
There are of course about a million ways to skin this particular cat and plenty of them are good.
The benefit of using your own system is that you can trivially reference information from many websites via one method instead of relying on the many and varied features of many sites. The benefit of copying the full relevant text is both that you can search that text and if a site or a comment goes missing tomorrow or 5 years from now you aren't out the information.
There are 3 ways to save a comment within HN: comment, upvote (your list of upvoted comments is visible to you only), favorite (your list of favorited comments is publicly visible). To favorite a comment you have to visit that comment specifically (click on its timestamp).
There are of course other ways to save comments, such as bookmarking with your browser or other bookmark applications.
None of those are systemic causes. Those are all cases of individual prejudice or racism adding up to make a statistical significance. Calling this systemic racism is a good way of how to never solve the actual problem.
Most of the examples were about police targeting black people disproportionately compared to other races concluding that is because of systemic racism. Is there a law that compels police officers to behave in such a way? The answer is none. Therefore it can't be systemic. The targeting comes from individual decisions by individual officers. Whether this is from prejudice or bad experience or plain racism is unknown. For that you would have to divide individuals officers into buckets by their race in see the statics for each bucket. For example do black officers also arrest disproportionate number of black people? You would need all the combinations from different buckets to get a sense of underlying reasons.
What if a certain group of laws (say drug laws) was created specifically so police could target certain minorities? There isn't any particular motivation in the law to arrest more black people for marijuana use, but despite similar usage by race (2-4% difference https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/08/11/char...) arrests for Blacks happen at 3-6 times Whites. There's lots to suggest the war on drugs is racially motivated, but it criminalizes drug use and possession, not race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_war_on_drugs)
>What if a certain group of laws (say drug laws) was created specifically so police could target certain minorities?
Could you point to such a law or even better cite a paragraph from such a law where you feel it targets certain minorities? How do police officers from minority background do their job?
Could you provide a link to a law that requires harsher sentencing for black people (specific paragraph would be appreciated)? Do you also have statistics on how harsh judges from different races are towards black people when sentencing?
This reminds me of the debate between micro evolution and macro evolution. Nobody is confused that often these disparate outcomes are the cumulative effect of the decisions of many biased decisions by people inside the systems. It's still systemic racism because the outcome of all those peoples behavior is a system that discriminates. No racist intention needs to be spelled out in any rule or law for systemic racism to exist.
"Black people get 20% longer prison sentences for the same crimes even when you control for criminal history"
Why "Even" ? It does not say anything about racism if you do not control for other factors, like criminal history and society inclusion. It's phrased as if it would still hold without control variable, and the author is doing a favor to potential nitpicker. It may be true, but the "Even" does not make me confident of the scientific value of the publication and the absence of confirmation bias of the author.
Repeat offenders are often given longer sentences. Mandatory minimum sentencing plays a big part in this. I assume that's what they're trying to control for.
If you don't encounter the justice system then almost nothing on your list is relevant. Most black kids won't be directly affected yet they do much worse at school. What specific examples of systemic racism have been shown to cause that? I've read some of the research and it's inconclusive. Many possible causes are suggested, a big one being cultural factors of the mothers.
So a normal black kid can safely pursue life without worrying that he or she has been held back by systemic racism.
Can I just say this makes me really happy to see this getting around. The list I shared here is my own compilation. It's nice to see others have found it useful.
It’s interesting that it has gotten around even without your knowledge. If I may ask do you have a large following on some social media platform, from where it originated or spread out?
No I've just posted it around Facebook and reddit. Mostly Facebook. Once in a while someone will post it to /r/sports and credit me with it, but besides that I didn't know anyone was sharing it.
"systemic racism" is intentionally deceptive language. I think you'd be hard-pressed to constructive uses of this jargon where people are actually trying to solve specific, well-defined problems.
Systemic racism isn't intentionally deceptive. It's self explanatory, but just like anything the more you investigate the more layered and multifaceted it becomes.
For me it's 3 main things.
1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed.
Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people.
2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies.
Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police.
3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups.
This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.
"Systemic racism" is a conspiracy theory. It is a very convenient term because it is not disprovable easily yet allow to make a whole group of people responsible to all the problems of another one.
It's not easily disprovable because all the evidence supports its existence. I see identical criticisms of global warming. Which is so difficult to disprove on account of all the evidence supporting its existence. It would be easy to disprove either. You would just need the evidence to show they are wrong.
The parent poster gave you a great example in terms of the same resume getting fewer call backs with a black sounding name. Instead of dismissing it as a conspiracy theory it would be good to understand it.
It is true that many people have attributed a wide range issues to it, on offentimes shaky reasoning, but there are also very clear examples of codified rules and laws keeping minority races down, for instance the minimum wage.
It was first implemented locally in the reconstruction era south to keep blacks from competing with white labor.
Later, in the 1920s, African Americans had a higher rate of employment than White Americans! But after the federal minimum wage passed, their economic power was destroyed and has yet to recover.
Today, most people don't consider it as having anything to do with race, but when it was first put on the books, it was specifically designed to hurt them.
It's not just about explaining, it's about identity, ideology and activism.
To posit the issues as 'merely explaining' is kind of to strawman people's legit concerns.
CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose.
If this were an in issue of merely 'explaining to people who systematic limitations might work' - and being sufficiently nuanced about it, then I think this whole thing would be a lot less controversial.
I think there's a way for us to talk to kids about the potentialities of systematic racism without using the language of activism.
CRT is a form of activism and ideology that goes far beyond explaining.
The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue.
The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy.
So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait.
Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'.
The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so.
But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'.
Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc..
When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression.
On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries.
This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3]
Systemic racism no longer exists or at least I’m completely unaware of it. I find proponents of this theory like people who believe in big foot. Somehow he’s out there but they have zero evidence for it
Other people have linked direct stats in this thread, and I encourage looking around at them. But also, just think about your theory in the abstract for a second.
Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board.
Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and every negative system has been eliminated? In what is essentially less than the lifespan of a single generation?
People treat the civil rights movement like it's this very old event that we've all moved past. I don't necessarily blame people for having that perspective, because that's the way we're taught about it in schools. But the civil rights movement was very recent.
You think we overhauled the entire housing market in 60 years? We have not yet had even a single president that was born after the civil rights movement. So from my perspective, even ignoring the stats and research on this subject, I keep hearing people tell me that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the voting rights act of 1965 passed, all the racists just, I don't know, died or something. That they can't possibly exist anymore, and they can't possibly have taught anything negative to their immediate kids who went on to be CEOs and politicians.
I've never been in a room on a hiring committee where they were like, you know what? let's give this white guy a chance. I have been in the room where were like, let's give this minority an extra chance literally dozens of times. I find it very hard to believe that there is an elaborate rouse being played on me personally and that despite not knowing any single person who would actively discriminate against someone, it is everywhere and omnipresent. Do some racists exist? Sure. Are there enough to create this environment where it is a major problem for minorities? No. No way.
> and that despite not knowing any single person who would actively discriminate against someone
I've met plenty of people who I believe would actively discriminate against someone because of their race, and I'm an asocial white person who avoids public spaces. I just replied to a comment on this very page that openly argued that unequal outcomes in Black communities were the result of biological differences. I don't know what word to use for the belief that Blacks are biologically inferior other than the word 'racist'. I can't speak to anyone else's experiences, maybe you've been fortunate to interact with better communities than me, but I don't personally think this stuff is particularly rare.
If we're going off of what is and isn't hard to believe, I don't find systemic racism to be far-fetched. There was, objectively, an omnipresent, elaborate rouse being played on Black communities for the entirety of American history leading up to at least the civil rights act. That part isn't debatable. So for me, the wild conclusion to draw is that after >180 years of targeted oppression, everyone involved in those systems immediately vanished after a law was passed.
60 years is not enough time to fix wealth gaps in a preexisting neighborhood, not unless we take active steps to fix them. It's just really obvious to me that the reason many ghettos exist is because we built them; there's records of banks deliberately choosing not to invest in those areas because of race. We never did any kind of restitution plan or went back and gave those communities the investment money we denied them earlier. Those areas didn't immediately become rich or get better schools just because a law was passed.
But if you want to look at statistics instead of anecdotes, this is also something that has been studied a lot if you're willing to put in the effort to research it. There's a lot that people can debate around systemic racism, but at the very least, it's pretty hard not to acknowledge that there are unequal outcomes happening. I know you saw breakyerself's comment, do you think that none of those stats are worth being concerned about?
Have you not seen companies with white guys in leadership promoting whoever they seem to have the best rapport with and that just happens to be mostly white guys like themselves? No racism of any kind is needed for a companies leadership to become homogeneous.
> I've never been in a room on a hiring committee where they were like, you know what? let's give this white guy a chance.
I have seen people giving white guys changes again and again and again. And then make them fall upwards. Some took up those chances, others did not. I am not even calling something sinister in all those situations (through in some yeah). Just stating that giving a white guy a chance is not something rare.
There is a mountain of academic study on the subject. I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it, but without doing the research I don't know what you think you would have stumbled across by accident that would have proven things to you. Especially if you're already primed to think it's not real.
11% of Americans openly believe in white supremacy and half of republicans think immigration weakens us as a nation despite centuries of America benefiting profoundly from immigration.
The study says 5.6%, and how you’re defining “white supremacy” is extremely dishonest:
> Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important.” They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents’ feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from “none at all” to a “great deal.”
These people are opposed to affirmative action. The Biden administration is literally excluding white people from things like farm loan forgiveness and SBA loans. Cities are excluding them from things like mortgage subsidies. Companies are openly talking about quota systems. “White men” is used as a pejorative.
Maybe these people are like the “war on Christmas” folks and are blowing this stuff out of proportion. But when there is literal discrimination against white people being baked into our laws, calling them “white supremacist” for saying in a survey that white people should try to get those laws overturned is totally psychotic.
Voter ID laws disproportionately affect racial minorities to this day, and are tantamount to a poll tax until the State bears the burden of providing ID.
Regardless that was the motivation. It may have been a failed effort, but it was absolutely the intention and it's got to hurt being a black person in this day and age and know that lawmakers are still looking for ways to exclude you from our democratic system.
Whose motivation? People who support Voter ID do so for the same reason voter ID is required in many racially homogenous countries: it avoids even the appearance of impropriety or manipulability. If you look at how elections are conducted in say Taiwan, there are many rituals that are designed to provide visible evidence of how hard the election would be to tamper with. That builds confidence in the election system—irrespective of whether additional security is actually needed. (I have locks in my house even though I’ve never been robbed.)
> Majorities of whites (74%), blacks (69%) and other minorities (82%) say voters should be required to show photo identification before being allowed to vote. Voters under 40 support voter ID laws more than do older voters.
It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.