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Why People Feel Like Victims

nautil.us

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Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#301

Post by strogonoff »

didibus wrote: post #68
rayiner wrote: post #30

> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…

It's learned by going through trauma or PTSD enduring experiences. That's what the empirical data showed. It is not learned by simple teaching and seeing others attitudes, that bit was a non proven hypothesis that the interviewee said they think cultural differences might have an effect, but their experimentation were only done in Israel. So when you hear "learned behavior" don't think as in this is what my parents t…

I wouldn’t go as far as to presume that a typical parent, having been traumatised through being a victim of such a system themselves, is capable of teaching the topic strictly informatively, with impartiality and without imparting a (hopefully lesser) trauma on their children. It tends to seep through generations.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#302

Post by nitrogen »

bosswipe wrote: post #228
rayiner wrote: post #30

> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…

As another brown guy with kids my anecdote is that I was discriminated by my high school counselor[1] but I took that as a life lesson. The lesson wasn't that white people are evil, but that bias is real and I have to be aware of what's going on and stand up for myself. The lesson has served me well and I've been very successful. Bias of all types is real, it makes no sense to me to hid that fact from my kids. I just…

Not to discount your experience, but I think high school counselors and university advisors just aren't very good in general, or are at least very hit or miss. They will tell all kinds of students not to bother trying for an elite school, or try to steer them away from college altogether. I also missed out on a lot of opportunities that I only recognized in hindsight, because nobody thought to tell me and I didn't know where to look.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#303

Post by michaelmrose »

wsc981 wrote: post #288
dr_dshiv wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism?

> What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism? Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In theory but there is effectively already in many cases greater affirmative action for white people already. Lets look at Harvard as a case study.

43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits.

Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#304

Post by nurspouse »

rayiner wrote: post #30

> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…

> I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.

I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?

If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?

When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.

I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.

Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#305

Post by vinay427 »

wsc981 wrote: post #288
dr_dshiv wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism?

> What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism? Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> Since it’s selecting people based on race.

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#306

Post by michaelmrose »

qchris wrote: post #250
breakyerself wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opp…

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.

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#307

Post by michaelmrose »

tasogare wrote: post #236
breakyerself wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upwa…

"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.

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.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#309

Post by michaelmrose »

prestigious wrote: post #161
breakyerself wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans...

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#310

Post by open0 »

breakyerself wrote: post #174
prestigious wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> * I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it*

I do.

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