Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

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"Institutional racism,” also “Systemic racism,” is not a vague, bogeyman term, it has a specific and objective meaning. It can be measured and has been measured, repeatedly.

In almost every area of American life, there are measurable effects. Blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crimes. They are more likely to be sent to prison and to get longer prison sentences given the same criminal records and the same circumstances.

As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.

These are facts, and on Hacker News we prize facts. As it is so often put when talking about things like creationism, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.”

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What I am finding more and more is a certain type of rhetoric, I will call it “Racism Denial.” It works just like Creationism Denial and Climate Change Denial. The denialist does not approach these discussions with any good faith attempt to discuss the issues or to weigh the factors on display.

The denialist has an agenda, and the agenda is to derail progress, to disrupt any and all attempts to fix what ails the system.

This is because the denialist fears that change will hurt them personally. The creationist denies evolution, because accepting evolution means turning away from the creationist God, which means letting go of the religious fervour that they have adopted as a core part of their identity.

The climate change denier denies climate change because accepting climate change means another step towards ending certain industries and jobs. They fear the loss of their income, the dissolution and decay of their coal mining town, the loss of jobs making gasoline-powered cars and a transfer of economic wealth to places like California where they make clean electric cars.

So let me ask you: What do you personally fear from people nodding and saying “Yes, there is systemic racism in America?” What do you think you will lose? What bad things will happen to you and to America if people stop pretending there is a problem and stop blaming blacks for everything that happens to them?

Why are you trying so hard to pretend there’s nothing going on?

As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.

That is an oft-cited conclusion from an old study that has not been reproduced in the tech industry (the classic one is http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873, a 2003 study in Boston and Chicago where they submitted resumes based on newspaper ads), where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates.

Someone should repro this in tech, though, it would be quite useful to know how things look here and now!

> where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates

My guess is that if this is true at all, it's true only for a relatively small number of prominent companies, and that it has only recently become true. There's certainly a lot of public discussion, but I suspect it only weakly correlates with private discussion at most tech companies, and that in turn weakly correlates with actual action.

Like you, I'd like to see it reproduced. A few years back, when bias-denial was more entrenched, I paid a researcher a few thousand dollars to look at reproducing it. It's certainly doable, but there are a number of challenges, and ultimately I decided it wouldn't move the discussion forward as much as I hoped; the denialists and the foot-draggers would just pick nits or find something else to use as a shield. And the people who understand the problem don't really need more proof.

But if you (or anybody (or a coalition of anybodies)) would like to drop $20-50k on doing a tech-specific version of this, drop me a line and I can put you in touch with researchers and share my notes.

Another interesting parallel, is the people who turn up on articles about renewable energy to tell you that wind power doesn't work, that it kills birds, that it uses more carbon than it saves etc. And then it becomes clear they don't believe in climate change, and that is what drives their involvement in the conversation. This then makes their opinions on how best to solve climate change a bit suspect at best.

Similarly, if you believe that racism doesn't exist or (subtly different) that some races are simply inferior and thus deserve a lowly place in society, then your list of talking points on the horrors of affirmative action ring very hollow.

> What I am finding more and more is a certain type of rhetoric, I will call it “Racism Denial.”

That's an excellent name for it. What I find especially frustrating about it is how it's dressed up in a search for objective truth. However, the only kind of evidence they want is the kind that proves racism. They never appear to search for evidence for the opposite proposition, that racism does not exist. That's always their given, their ground, their unquestioned assumption.

In the broader historical context, that's ridiculous. The US's history is enormously racist. We fought an entire civil war over whether black people were actually people. The racism denialists are in effect claiming that on some unspecified date in history, all of that racism evaporated and left no trace in heart, mind, or law. That's the proposition I think we should be demanding evidence for.

The US's history is enormously racist. We fought an entire civil war over whether black people were actually people. The racism denialists are in effect claiming that on some unspecified date in history, all of that racism evaporated and left no trace in heart, mind, or law. That's the proposition I think we should be demanding evidence for.

What explains the similarity in crime rates, test scores, achievement, SES, between Africans in the US, England, and Sweden? 2 of the 3 having no history of enslaving Africans.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of racism-denialist burden-shifting that I am talking about. Thank you for demonstrating it so neatly.

You're taking observations(one of them isn't even a factual observation[0]) and then a priori assigning a cause, "systemic racism," to those observations. That is not how facts, or rational, coherent reasoning works.

[0] Races aren't arrested at different rates for the same crimes, race percentage in victim reports match race percentage in arrests.

Drug arrest rate appear to vary as the result of compound charges, i.e. while being arrested for another crime, blacks happen to have drugs on them. Because blacks commit some crimes at a much higher rate than whites the drug numbers look biased without this context.

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Reread the questions and arguments I posed, then if you want to respond to them, ok, but otherwise don't waste my time.

Your entire argument is based on a false dichotomy. You say “There is no racism, everything can be explained by black people” and then try to demonstrate that black people have some problem or other.

But this is like saying that a road cannot be unsafe, look, here are statistics showing that some of the people who drive are drunk.

You trying to demonstrate that black people this or black people that in aggregate does not in any way invalidate the proposition that there is systemic racism.

Racism is, quite simply, when individuals are not judged on their merits, but on their membership in a class. If you say to me that statistically this or that or the other thing about American Blacks, that does not in any way say that individuals are not being judged and incurring negative opportunities because of their being black.

If anything, the message you are putting out is, “Yes, there is racism, but look, here is why it is justified.” I have debunked this argument before, and I won’t waste my time retyping the entire thing out.

“Racism is Socially Engineered Injustice:” http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html

And you are definitely attempting to socially engineer injustice. Witness the fact that in this alleged rebuttal, you ignored the major accusation I made: That you are denying racism exists.

What you did id completely ignore that and go back to trying to prattle on about how bad black people are. So I charge you again: Why are you so invested in getting people to believe that there is no racism?

What are you working so hard to prevent?

When riding a bike, I think it is wise to judge the class "car drivers on Saturday night," different than the class "car drivers on Tuesday afternoon," because "car drivers on Saturday night" are more likely to be drunk.

I ignored all the stuff where you went off the rails and started making wacky accusations, or whatever, it wasn't particularly clear...

My only mention of blacks was in showing how the talking point of "arrested more often for the same crimes(drug possession)" doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you consider how often those drug crimes are occurring in combination with other more serious crimes. In that case it is perfectly reasonable to talk in aggregate, since that is what you were doing in relaying that faulty stat.

that does not in any way say that individuals are not being judged and incurring negative opportunities because of their being black.

Whether that is occurring and to what degree cannot be said. Even if it could, what do you want to do about it? You can't just re-education camp everyone until they meet your standards.

Human nature doesn't work that way. But maybe you can take solace in knowing that biases may present themselves not just about racial groups. Saturday night drivers may be judged differently than other days, men may be judged more suspiciously around small children than women, investments more likely to return money may be judged as more favorable places to put money.

This is clearly a personal issue for you. I think we agree that we both want the best for all people.

My feeling is that for a harmonious society with integrity, we need to ascribe to phenomena, causes for which there is clear evidence for a causal relationship.

If you want to ascribe "institutional racism" as the cause to certain phenomena, but the observation can be made that those same phenomena exist in environments without the institutions you are blaming, Mexican performance in Mexico vs the USA for example, then the "institutional racism" theory doesn't hold water.

But even without that avenue to negate, you would still need significant evidence to validate the "institutional racism" theory. You can't just say, "I've observed Phenomenon B, and I've theorized Cause A, so A must cause B."

Decrying "institutional racism" as this kind of ambiguous, universal menace doesn't help anybody. First you would need clear evidence of it. Then it wouldn't be ambiguous, then you could solve the problem. You can't solve ambiguous problems, they need to be specific.

If you can't even lay out clear unambiguous evidence for the problem you are trying solve, then how will you know when it is solved? What are you fighting for?

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