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6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

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Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#121

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

proveanegative wrote: post #52
calibraxis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our bureaucratic preoccupation with racial and gender categories is much like those who segmented bloodlines into Untouchables, or royalty. (As if it was ever impressive to be related to some glorified dictator called a "king".) Consider that, depending on your racial category, it may be ok for the US state to choke you to death in public. Even just to speak normal English, you have to basically surveil into people's…

Your jab against monarchy is unwarranted. A hereditary monarch who is recognized as legitimate has better incentives than a garden variety military dictator.

Jabs against monarchy are always warranted.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#122

Post by icebraining »

[deleted] wrote: post #101
TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because brains don't have enough processing power not to generalize. You wouldn't be able to leave your house if you didn't use heuristics for inference all the time.

[deleted]

Do you ask every single person you meet if they speak the local language? That must get tiring. Or do you generalize and assume that people in a certain country by and large speak that country's language?

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #118
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideal world, sure, we wouldn't make assumptions about identity based on names. But it happens. I'm not sure that there is an answer that'd make everyone happy, to be honest. Of course we would, unless in the ideal world names would be uniformly distributed among population in a completely random way. But they're not. The only problem here is seeing reasonable inference from a known probability distribution as ethic…

Wasn't meaning ethics, just the risk of looking silly over time. If you tend to make a lot of assumptions about someone just from their name before encountering them, then you are pretty much guaranteeing that you are going to get burnt a lot over time, unless you don't meet many people, as it simply isn't that good a guide.

I agree. Names just ain't that good of a heuristic.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#124

Post by Jun8 »

Kenji wrote: post #6

I don't think the other people are at fault here. I think it's reasonable to assume that someone with a stereotypically black name is black, just like it's reasonable to assume that a random IT professor is male based on the fact that 90%* actually are. As long as you owe up to your error when you notice it (and e.g. apologize). It's a reasonable optimization that works out more often than not. The problem only start…

I think you are absolutely right. The other point that can be made is that P(person is black | name=Jamaal, person is US citizen) is much higher than P(person is black | name=Jamaal), since that is a common name in Arabic and in Muslim countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal. One can argue that the extra "a" in the spelling of Jamaal as opposed to the more common transliteration Jamal is a marker but I don't think regular people notice this.

Note that the other weirdness is that the common US usage of "black" to commonly refer to African-Americans is very problematic: An arab may look dark skinned but most would never consider themselves "African" or there are African-Americans that have lighter skin colors than, say, people from Sri Lanka. Similarly for the label "white". For example, when we say "white men's advantage" there is an implicit assumption, not always stated or well-understood by users, that this refers to white men in the US, or perhaps more broadly to countries where there's a large population of "non-whites" that have been historically repressed.

Personally, when faced with a form that requires me to fill in race, I mark "other" or "does not want to disclose" rather than "white", since I don't feel I fully understand what the connotations of that label are for the purposes of that form.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#125

Post by revelation »

rayiner wrote: post #77
Kenji wrote: post #6

I don't think the other people are at fault here. I think it's reasonable to assume that someone with a stereotypically black name is black, just like it's reasonable to assume that a random IT professor is male based on the fact that 90%* actually are. As long as you owe up to your error when you notice it (and e.g. apologize). It's a reasonable optimization that works out more often than not. The problem only start…

Using name is a reasonable way to optimize figuring out someone's race. The question is: why are we trying to figure out someone's race? If you're talking about reducing effort, isn't the easiest thing to just not ponder the question of someone's race? People wouldn't bother to try and answer that question if they didn't care about what the answer was. Now, the fact that people care is not in and of itself evidence o…

Well, in the one example given, a waiter used the name to discern that the debit card would probably belong to a black person. That seems like a perfectly innocent use.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#126

Post by hyperpape »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #115
hyperpape wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding minority populations: it's not equivalent. But it is often the case. Think Texas, New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. People talk shit or joke about the French, Italians, Germans too, but French and German people are considered white. Same with Poles and Italians. Those stats you gave did not consider people of Italian or German descent as non-White.

Hm. My wife (Italian descent) reports differently. During her southwest upbringing she was treated as anything but white. I guess it depends upon your environment.

Perhaps I'm too quick to assume my experience is universal on this point. At school growing up, the white people were fairly mixed in actual ethnic background. Statistically, though, any researcher would consider Italian white if they used "white" as a category.

Would it be too personal to ask what she meant? Was she taken for Hispanic, or did people use anti-Italian stereotypes?

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#127

Post by amyjess »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #102
[deleted] wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Not that guy, but I've considered changing my name so it sounds more exotic and unique. From what I've seen, people with "generic" or biblical names don't seem to get chosen as often as they used to when it comes to academic and prestigious stuff. It would be nice if people could use two or three names legally. Like when you use multiple emails.

I was born with an uncommon last name.

It caused me a lot of distress because nobody could properly spell or pronounce it. I had electric bills come in with my last name misspelled. My apartment complex had to tear up a lease and reprint it because they misspelled my last name (I caught it before I signed it, fortunately), and I'd been living there for over half a decade when that happened. Edit: it was also a variant form of an ethnic slur (you can thank bigoted Ellis Island officials for sticking my ancestor with the name), which made me really uncomfortable.

I hated it.

Last year, I had it legally changed. I was changing my first and middle names anyway (as part of my gender transition), so I threw in a new last name in as well (where I live, it doesn't cost any more or require any more paperwork to change your whole name than it does to change just the first and middle). My new last name is a monosyllabic word that's in the dictionary, refers to a common household object, and has no variant spellings. I've never been happier with my name.

> It would be nice if people could use two or three names legally. Like when you use multiple emails.

As long as you're not trying to defraud people, you can use as many aliases as you want. Of course, you'll still have to use your official name when dealing with the government, but there are companies who will respect aliases and use your chosen alias for all purposes except tax reporting.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#129

Post by the8472 »

kaa2102 wrote: post #111
the8472 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating the observation that a person who has a name predominantly used by african-americans is most likely african-american with further, discriminating, acts based on that observation.

"We are blind to our blindness." Where do the generalizations stop?

As others have mentioned, we generalize all the time. We have to.

No single stone is like the other, and yet we we talk about stones and pebbles like they were some uniform set of platonic ideals and some sharp boundary separating one from the other.

We lack both knowledge about each individual and the capacity to hold all detailed information of all individuals in our heads to not shove them into categories.

Of course once you know someone better you slice them into finer categories ("polite person", "work-a-holic", ...) and thus add facets and tidits to your model of that other person. But that in itself is a continuum from broad categories to unique bits of information about a person.

If you're walking down a street at night in a city with a high crime rate and a group of tattooed, muscular youths comes around a corner then you're likely not going to treat them as individuals.

You will at least consider crossing the street because you categorize them as potential threat. Even if that particular group of youths is no threat, it's still a matter of probabilities they might be and avoiding them seems a reasonable risk-avoidance strategy because it costs you little.

You simply don't have the time or necessary information to treat them as individuals.

So as long as your generalizations are statistically sound (instead of outdated stereotypes) they are useful and should only stop once better information becomes available.

Re: 6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal I'm White'

#130

Post by stefantalpalaru »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #14

> [horrific racial expletive deleted] Nigga please... The only horrific things about a word coming straight from the latin root for "black" are the linguistic segregation behind it and the fact that this segregation is now willingly enforced by the minorities themselves.

"Shit" and "science" derive from the same proto-Indo-European root. Does it then follow that I can use both words interchangeably?

When you go as far as Proto-Indo-European roots you're in linguistic fantasy territory, but anyway, I was talking about "a word coming straight from the Latin root". It's a clear evolution from the Latin "niger" to Spanish "negro" and illiterate English colonist "nigger". And it kept its meaning of "black" all this time.

Since we're talking etymology in the grayed out bottom of a HN thread, did you know that the word "slave" comes from the Latin "sclavus" that means "Slav" and is therefore offensive to people of Slavic ancestry? Will you stop using it now that you know? I hope not, but it goes to show the absurdity of putting hurt feelings before reason.

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