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Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

About 10% of Danes are non-Danish migrants. I don't know the composition of the lowest 20% of the US, but I doubt they are entirely from ethnic minorities.

Even if we take your claim as true, the fact that different ethnic groups are highly stratified and mobility is restricted, like a caste system, is just as significant. Maybe even more so, because it implies a racist society.

Claiming, in effect, that we should discount a lack of social mobility for those born into certain ethnic groups, seems like racism.

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1. The 10% of Danes that are migrants are all recent arrivals and hence I doubt there are generations to study inter-generational mobility on. When they will have been in the country for generations, I would be extremely surprised to find them having higher social mobility than in the US.

2. Re racism - I'm sorry but that's typical liberal nonsense. Discounting all differences between groups of people, assuming equal distribution of intelligence & culture and then ascribing resulting group differences to 'racism'.

What's rather interesting is that educational results among various US sub-groups map rather closely to their old-world kin. Ie US whites/blacks/asians correlate fairly well to the countries where they originally came from (hispanics obviously not having an old world mapping). Hence the hang-wringing "Our kids are failing vs X" is actually misplaced as they're comparing apples and multi-fruit juice.

Every so often I encounter people who think that human ethnic groups work like races in Dungeons and Dragons, and I feel rather sorry for them.

Because they won't be admitted to the SWPL heaven?

Your ideas actually remind me of the barely literate from the middle ages who believed that the world was sitting on 3 whales or something like that.

Preponderance of evidence to the contrary was dismissed with 'That's not what it says in the Bible!'.

You've got same religion ("all people are equal") that goes against ALL real-world observations. But just like they waved everything off with 'Because G-d wills it', you've got 'Because racism!'.

So you think human ethnic groups DO work like races in D&D?

Could you share with me the table of STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA for Blacks, Whites and Asians? Oh, and Jews, of course.

Do we get skill and attack bonuses or special saving throws?

No, I don't think that.

But I'm enough of a realist to see first generation asians / indians operating laundromats or chinese restaurants and their children becoming doctors or lawyers. So to my mind US is the land of high social mobility - for people who are intelligent and are willing to work.

I don't think that just the color of your skin have unique characteristics for each race. However, I do think that the culture you are raised in does instill different values that contribute to your success in society.

A driven person will have the power to change their community, no matter their skin color. But one culture over another may be more effective at establishing the preconditions that driven people arise from. Evaluating people based on the cultural enviornment seems effective but I'm not entirely convinced that the fault lines are strictly related to race. I think people get confused when they see a group of people associated with a specific economic outcome and erroneous attribute that to race instead of culture.

Those conversations seem valuable, but it seems easy to misinterpret such a conversation as either racist or classist. Definitely these things should be talked about behind closed doors to avoid character assassination attempts.

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