Why People Feel Like Victims • Hacker News Board

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#461

Post by exporectomy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

ziml77 wrote: post #170

danShumway wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? 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 ou…

> 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…

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#462

Post by rayiner » Sat, May 08, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #459

rayiner wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> White “progressives” have not made Omar (or Tlaib) the face of anything, nor does Omar pretend to speak for all Muslims (or all Somali refugees for that matter). Omar also does not have “extreme” views; she is a mainstream Democrat with mainstream center-left policy positions. Not even Democrats think she’s a “mainstream Democrat.” Political she’s squarely in the progressive wing. But my point was theological. She…

> theological. She has extreme views on social issues recognized by virtually no American Muslim scholars She does not purport to be a religious scholar or an authority on religion... Her politics seem broadly comparable to the majority of young Muslims (say, born > 1980) I have met in cosmopolitan American cities. These tend to be secularized and at least roughly share the values of their non-Muslim peers. Should su…

> Her politics seem broadly comparable to the majority of young Muslims (say, born > 1980) I have met in cosmopolitan American cities.

Which represents a very small fraction of all American Muslims. Also, note that in “cosmopolitan cities” you’re probably not interacting with a representative cross section of Muslim Americans.

> Should such people not be allowed to participate in the political process?

This is the third post where you try to turn it back to the politician, when I repeatedly make clear I’m talking about the media. These people are welcome to their politics. My problem is with the white people who control how Muslims are portrayed politically. Whenever you see a panel of Muslims speaking on issues, for example, they are always selected to agree with white progressive views. They never sound like my mom or aunts.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#463

Post by exporectomy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

breakyerself wrote: post #144

exporectomy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opp…

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#464

Post by exporectomy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #333

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…

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 becaus…

Ever been to London? It's thoroughly segregated among many ethnicities and nationalities. Here's one map

http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/

but it's more fine grained than that. Bangladeshis are separate from Pakistanis, for instance.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#465

Post by rayiner » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:00 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #237

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…

You might have been better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts, as long as what was in their deepest thoughts did not result in you getting arrested for no reason, getting killed by the very people who you thought existed to protect you for no reason, your kids not getting accepted in the schools, or after school programs they deserved for no reason, etc. It’s amazing to me that brown people, l…

> You might have been better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts, as long as what was in their deepest thoughts did not result in you getting arrested for no reason, getting killed by the very people who you thought existed to protect you for no reason, your kids not getting accepted in the schools, or after school programs they deserved for no reason, etc.

But it doesn’t, right? Asians are one third as likely to be incarcerated as white people, half as likely to be shot by the police, and overrepresented in elite schools. Teaching my Asian kids that “white supremacy” is working them is absurd.

> It’s amazing to me that brown people, like myself, who do really well in this country relative to most minorities, live to pretend as if they should just be the model minority without realizing that the only reason they can is because of all the blood sweat and tears spilt by the minority, often black, activists before them.

This thread is about my Asian kids. Black people face unique barriers, and they should educate their kids as they see fit. But people shouldn’t project that experience onto Asian kids, or assume the same solutions should be applied to Asian kids.

> If victim culture exists on a racial basis in the US, it exists almost entirely within the majority community

There are just a handful of countries in the world where foreigners can come and be more successful than the natives, and the US is one of the few. The majority seems to have done a pretty great job building a welcoming society.

> which shows that there’s absolutely no evidence that discussing real victimization causes a sense of victim hood amongst victims.

This article is about precisely that!

> In fact, there’s good reason to believe that understanding that the racism they face might be systemic both allows the victims of the racism to not feel like victims anymore, but instead look for ways to succeed despite it

Generations of Asians who grew up and succeeded in the US without being taught about “systemic racism” proves that it isn’t necessary.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#466

Post by jacobolus » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #462

jacobolus wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> theological. She has extreme views on social issues recognized by virtually no American Muslim scholars She does not purport to be a religious scholar or an authority on religion... Her politics seem broadly comparable to the majority of young Muslims (say, born > 1980) I have met in cosmopolitan American cities. These tend to be secularized and at least roughly share the values of their non-Muslim peers. Should su…

> Her politics seem broadly comparable to the majority of young Muslims (say, born > 1980) I have met in cosmopolitan American cities. Which represents a very small fraction of all American Muslims. Also, note that in “cosmopolitan cities” you’re probably not interacting with a representative cross section of Muslim Americans. > Should such people not be allowed to participate in the political process? This is the th…

There is a strong selection bias involved here, but it is not the one you claim. The selection bias is: people who care strongly about perceived injustices and political failures devote their time and attention to politics, and people who devote their time and attention to politics (especially listening to a broad range of people in their communities) end up learning about what isn’t working for people and how people are suffering.

Then those political actors (organizers, activists, political staffers, policy analysts, campaign staff, journalists, NGO staff, ...) put effort into sharing their message and ideas and some e.g. end up getting elected.

If large numbers of people who “sound like your mom and aunts” get heavily involved in their local and regional political process, some of them will end up with their faces on cable news or whatever. It’s not like typical media outlets dial random telephone numbers until they hit on interview subjects who match the ideology of some secret cabal.

For better or worse though, in general older first-generation immigrants (of whatever background) are less involved in politics than more established groups. This comes down substantially to their own preferences about what to spend their time on, as well as cultural comfort/fluency, etc.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#467

Post by exporectomy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

breakyerself wrote: post #423

anchpop wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#468

Post by Klinky » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

reaLg_move_in_3 wrote: post #430

Klinky wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the west being founded on slavery, and genocides while sustaining racism and misogyny for hundreds of years. I hear a lot of "head in the sand" thinking. If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist and never happened.

> west being founded on slavery The "west" was not founded on slavery, this is incorrect. This is the kind of "woke revisionism" that things like the 1619 tried to push through and were inaccurate. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/24/editorial-1... https://reason.com/2020/03/06/1619-project-fact-checker-niko...

I don't know if I would consider the early colonies as "the founding" of the modern western powers. If you look at the founding of the USA it absolutely is accurate, many founding fathers were slave owners. Slavery also had influence within Canadian territories until it was outlawed. Both waged genocidal war on First Nations and Native Americans from the beginning.

The USA continued to perpetuate slavery and compromise with slavers for decades/centuries to come, after Canada and Britain had long since moved on.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#469

Post by faeriechangling » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:40 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #185

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.

> 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 prejudi…

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.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#470

Post by missedthecue » Sat, May 08, 2021, 6:26 AM UTC

theonlybutlet wrote: post #442

missedthecue wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The minimum wage keeps poor people down. That doesn't make it systemically racist.

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.