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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

#781

Post by RigelKentaurus »

felix_n wrote: post #710
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…

As long as we're talking about fair, is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs? Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the second kid getting, say, a nearly (but not quite) perfect SAT score…

>is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs?

That's the exact case I made. The kid with the absentee father has worked hard, and deserves to be helped. But it's independent of race.

>little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him

I caught the condescending tone here. We live in a good, safe school district but nothing else has been laid out for him. He found all the APs, college courses, internships and applied on his own. The one thing he's not is an entitled, spoilt brat -- he's the exact opposite who takes nothing for granted and works very hard to make full use of his opportunities. It's sad that some people can't see the difference.

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

#782

Post by mcguire »

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #450
mcguire wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. " I grew up white and lower middle class, but I've never been worried about being arrested hanging around my own house ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr... , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/0... , https://www.jsonline.com/s…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... Police killing black people for being black as some sort of racist unwritten policy is a myth. The rates shown here make perfect sense. And most (99%?) were armed. Also consider that there are hundreds of millions of Americans. It's difficult to fully grasp just how large that is. The media likes selling stories but that doesn't change the facts. A dozen…

First, those are cases of black people being arrested or detained, sometimes violently, by police. Not killed. Further, many of them resulted in a successful lawsuits against the police, which should tell you something about the quality of police actions.

Second, keep in mind that data about police violence, including deaths, are complete shit because police are not required to report data and no one has an incentive to do so. (I don't know what Statista's data sources are, but did you notice how the number of "unknown" race deaths increased in 2020 and 2021?)

"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study." (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6..., https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-pol...)

Here's another good article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z I'd suggest following the endnotes. "About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."

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

#783

Post by ClumsyPilot »

barelysapient wrote: post #473
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by thus argument we have nothing to improve in this country untill standards of living sink to the level of North Korea and finally noone will be willing to immigrate

It’s not an argument. It’s an observable fact.

Pgizer Covid vaccine contains mercury, that is an observable fact.

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

#784

Post by ClumsyPilot »

nradov wrote: post #478
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by thus argument we have nothing to improve in this country untill standards of living sink to the level of North Korea and finally noone will be willing to immigrate

The USA also has a positive net migration rate with the EU.

Does that still hold if you exclude poor post-soviet countries? they are like half of EU

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

#785

Post by jjtheblunt »

bolt7469 wrote: post #779
tanseydavid wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously...What?!??!

Interesting example: Elon Musk is technically an "African American," except the word is actually used to mean Black American

similarly, I think Charlize Theron has joked about the same for her, how confused the terminology is.

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

#786

Post by orthecreedence »

LegitShady wrote: post #656
orthecreedence wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, 99% of Marxism is "evaluation of the problem." It's highly descriptive, barely prescriptive. The more prescriptive offshoot of Marxism would be Leninism, and I agree that authoritarian command economies are a pretty bad idea.

>99% of Marxism is "evaluation of the problem." Splitting the hair between marxism and leninism isn't helpful in 2022, and marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.

Differentiating between two completely different things isn't splitting hairs.

> marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.

How so?

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

#787

Post by sbierwagen »

notlukesky wrote: post #702
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…

It's interesting that Mike Burry of the Big Short fame just did a post on this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1587420720644214799 The post is this since he famously deletes all his Twitter posts: If you are denying or justifying discrimination against Asian applicants for colleges or jobs, you know exactly how all the most oppressive racists of the past felt. -- By the way did you ever consider…

Presumably it's in reference to the case against Harvard currently before the Supreme Court: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1131789230/supreme-court-affi...

Among other things, Harvard is accused of adding a "personality" metric to admissions, covering likeability and attractiveness, and consistently scoring Asians low on it, to cancel out less important things like GPA, AP credits and SAT scores. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/harvard-admissions-a...

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

#788

Post by xyzzyz »

felix_n wrote: post #710
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…

As long as we're talking about fair, is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs? Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the second kid getting, say, a nearly (but not quite) perfect SAT score…

Doesn’t your argument only highlight how appalling it is to consider something as crude as the race of the applicant?

Even if you disregard how crude the official government racial classifications are (black Americans have much more in common with white Americans than with black Africans, for example, and Pakistanis have much more in common with Afghanis than with the former have with Japanese or the latter have with Swedish, contrary to what the governments racial groupings specify), if you are interested in recognizing hardship and overcoming the obstacles, why not just ask about those directly? When you read the students essay about his jailed father and mother working three jobs, what more do you learn from the mere race checkbox?

I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity. They really are, indeed, trying to achieve a certain color balance among their students, and they really do not care a lot about the diversity that’s more than skin deep. This is really as simple as that, and it’s disgusting.

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

#789

Post by strikelaserclaw »

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…

My father also came to this country with nothing and built himself up, but as someone else mentioned, my father was born in a high caste, he got an education to become an engineer when most people didn't even complete secondary school. There is something to be said about generations of cultural knowledge and success that makes you rise up from "temporary poverty". This is true of most of my family, due to a bad generation of parents they became poor but they used to be pretty wealth a couple generations ago, this is a stark difference in attitude from people who've always been in multi generational poverty, they don't know any succesful people, they don't have any role models, the color of their skin / caste makes them not confident in their abilities to succeed, realistically those people are the ones who need affirmative action. i'm sure your kid is smart enough to succeed in this world even if he went to berkeley instead of stanford.

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

#790

Post by RigelKentaurus »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #739
RigelKentaurus wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of your points are valid and I don't disagree with them. But you're assuming too much by saying that he has too narrow of a focus. You don't know him. My kid is strong in some areas, not as strong in others. He's realistic and knows that Harvard, Stanford are lottery schools for almost everyone. He has no feeling of entitlement, and neither do I, but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than…

> Many of your points are valid and I don't disagree with them. But you're assuming too much by saying that he has too narrow of a focus. You don't know him. My kid is strong in some areas, not as strong in others. He's realistic and knows that Harvard, Stanford are lottery schools for almost everyone. He has no feeling of entitlement, and neither do I, but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard tha…

>but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race. And as a dad, I don't like it. >You are displaying an amazing sense of entitlement.

This is how I objectively know he's being held to a much higher standard. A kid of any other race, to have the same chance of admission to these schools, will need an SAT score 250-450 points lower (depending on race), and a GPA 0.2 - 0.9 lower (again, depending on race), than him. To use Harvard's own statistic, "An Asian American in the fourth lowest decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%) but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%)" They tried to explain it on the basis of soft metrics like "personality". Funnily enough, interviewers didn't judge Asian Americans as low on personality and sociability. Only the admissions staff did. Go figure.

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