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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

economist.com

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Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#551

Post by eru »

qzw wrote: post #533
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a perfect microcosm of the title. Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives: > Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know,…

> That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect. Hey, I'm well aware of the doubt. As an Asian male who went to an elite university, I had doubts about everybody . Black kids, Native Americans, Latinos, women... definitely AA, it goes without saying. The jocks of co…

You are joking, but the higher average aptitude of the Asian male in uni mainly comes from them being discriminated against.

If you remove that discrimination, you'll let more of them in, and regression towards the mean will kick in.

For comparison, if you have a 'rich people' club, and they let blue people in when they own more than a million dollars, and green people only when they own more than a billion dollars, the green people in the club will be richer on average.

If you change the requirement to let anyone in who owns at least two million dollars, the gap in average wealth of admitted people from either group will narrow.

It won't necessarily disappear, because the underlying distributions of wealth might be weird. For all we know, after the change the average admitted blue one might be richer than the average admitted green.

You can build some real world example using data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl...

Fun fact: a club that only admits Americans owning more than 150 billion USD would be 50% African American.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#552

Post by eru »

birdyrooster wrote: post #377
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a perfect microcosm of the title. Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives: > Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know,…

It's not just immigrants from Africa or those who share their racial identity, but its also, and probably more importantly, about the lineages who were kidnapped from Africa as slaves and their families who were stolen from for generations which left very little in their communities to pass to their present day ancestors. It's not good enough to have black faces in high places, because there are people who have been…

Compare also Irish people? Of course, in eg Poland it's even more complicated.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#553

Post by Foobar8568 »

As an European, this focus on race, which is basically a social definition is truly crazy. The first aspect, how do you define people whose parents are from different constructs? How would an "Hispanic" father with an "African American" mother kid be declared ? And don't get me started on multigeneration or if it works just on look (let's forget how genes work) or "lineage"? By having to decide or denying mixity, it promotes the idea of "pure blood"/master race or blood. Just totally backward idea.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#554

Post by dang »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #331
favorited wrote: post #196

I've always loved how succinctly LBJ put it: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

I like how you edited the actual words

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. If you have more correct information, that's great, but please tell us what it is so we can all learn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#555

Post by [deleted] »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #437

Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged. I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year. My 17-year old is applying to universities to st…

[deleted]

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#556

Post by Georgelemental »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #463
Georgelemental wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women outperform men on GPA, SAT reading, and ACT humanities sections. Men do better on SAT math and ACT STEM sections

The difference is pretty small though. Like 30 points on the SAT

Small differences in mean generally mean larger differences in number of people above a high threshold.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#557

Post by xyzzyz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #503
xyzzyz wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents just weren't ready for interracial marriage, and were terrified their kids would date 'other'. Do you think this is why black parents were mostly against forced busing?

I cannot find evidence that black parents opposed the busing, much less why. Can you point me to some evidence?

Did you really express opinion about how forced busing worked without knowing such basic facts?

Here is, for example, a NYT article from 1973, describing result of a Gallup poll:

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/gallup-finds-few...

> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.

> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.

Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:

> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.

The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.

Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#558

Post by dang »

qzw wrote: post #312
givemeethekeys wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, it'll be awesome. In the short term, the few black kids and women who end up in engineering will get respect for making it into the program. And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.

Oh, certainly. A few years is all black kids and women need to overcome racial and gender prejudices in this country. Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now , and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin or the number of their X chromosomes?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. You can make your substantive points without that, and it's in your interest to, because it will give your comments more persuasive power.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#559

Post by acjohnson55 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #553

As an European, this focus on race, which is basically a social definition is truly crazy. The first aspect, how do you define people whose parents are from different constructs? How would an "Hispanic" father with an "African American" mother kid be declared ? And don't get me started on multigeneration or if it works just on look (let's forget how genes work) or "lineage"? By having to decide or denying mixity, it…

Not that long ago, when my parents were children, there was no such issue denying them the ability to use certain bathrooms or drinking fountains on account of their race, social construct or not, let alone attending the best schools. Thankfully, affirmative action was created by the time they went to college.

Your point is not a bad one. Race is not rigorously defined. And yet, there are large groups of people still suffering significant disadvantage along racial lines, for historic and ongoing reasons. It's not possible to address this in a race-blind way.

In practice, affirmative action policies work essentially on the honor system.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#560

Post by bushbaba »

pmonks wrote: post #539
RigelKentaurus wrote: post #437

Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged. I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year. My 17-year old is applying to universities to st…

What makes you think he’s only going to get a great CS education at the Ivies, Cal, Caltech, Stanford, etc.? Very few of the best graduates I’ve worked with in my ~30 year career studied at those schools - it was places like UW, UBC and Waterloo that stood out to me as producing a high number of high quality, socially adapted graduates. [edit] and before anyone asks, no I’m not Canadian

For engineering degrees for working within industry, the IVYs don’t get you much. There’s lots of highly ranked STEM universities that’ll open the same number of doors.

Where IVY undergrad matters is if they plan to pursue a PHD. And even that is debatable.

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